Favorite NON-Free Games

[WittyDroog]

We ramble a lot about free games, which is to be expected on a site that fosters the growth of free games, but what about published games you gotta fork over some scratch for (if you wish to be legit, that is, we'll assume you do). I'm sure we all get our influences from these kind of games, at least inspiration of game mechanics. What are some of your favorites?

(I'll only list one to get started, I don't want this to be a wall of text)

WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay: I'm sure I've rambled long and hard about WHRP, but really after a little over a decade and a half of gaming this guy is always my fallback favorite. I grew up in the WarHammer world, playing Fantasy Battles since I was a tyke. Now the Roleplaying game allows my players and I to explore the vicious and grim world of the Empire.

Setting is a huge factor of the game's appeal. It's GRIMDARK™ with sprinkles or heapings of dark comedy, which takes a lot of cues from Medieval Germany. Rife with xenophobia, religious intolerance, and corruption in every citizen it makes for great and complex scenarios.

The Mechanics of the game are great, in my humble opinion, using only 2d10 in percentile. Many criticise this system as being too harsh on the players, but I argue that's the point of the game. Your characters aren't grand "heroes", they're just scum trying to survive and it's really hard for them to do anything of real worth. If they're able to bludgeon the Cult Leader to death with a table leg and a shovel then it's a good day. WHRP's other mechanical plus (and vice to others) is it's use of tables. Tables after tables, for every single thing you can imagine. In fact character generation is 100% random, down to your race, career (of which there are OVER 250), name, how many warts are on your face, etc. The critical tables are graphic and juciy to describe to your players when they slice a bicep off a Beastman Gor, or when a Chaos Warrior tears a players arm off with stringy tendons trailing after. It really gives the player the feeling that WarHammer is a very fatal and unforgiving world, which makes most players (operative word: most) think twice before charging into battle. Many of my players try to find indirect means of succeeding confrontations instead of charging in rusty swords held high.

Overall, one of my favorites in the book.

Note: I have been recently trying FFG's 3rd Edition of the game, which tries to revolutionize RPGs in general by implementing tried and true mechanics of their many successful boardgames like Runebound and Descent. We;ve onyl played one game so far but it's kind of a headache. The necessity for handfuls of dice (on average you're rolling 6-7 custom dice for even the most BASIC of actions like Observation), paired with the integration of "action cards" gives it a weird feeling that isn't so much an RPG as a really expensive and complex board game. More on this as we play.

[SheikhJahbooty]

The last game I played that you have to pay for is Burning Wheel.

There were a few things I didn't like about it.

I didn't like how attributes interacted with skills. I found myself longing for WHFRP's system of you either have a skill or you don't. (Some people call that binary skills, zero or one). Or maybe just do away with attributes altogether, and just use traits to cover characters that differ in strength or intelligence (kind of like how FATE doesn't have attributes because aspects covers that). And determining injuries in combat was quite a hassle.

But I'm a little used to weird attributes and skills since as a kid I played Traveller quite a lot, and in many editions of Traveller, attributes are almost superfluous, providing only that cool hex-code that goes with your character. And in early editions of Traveller, skills were almost binary in that it was weird for someone to start the game with more than one level of a skill unless they were kind of old or the player was specifically going for that, and more than one level of a skill often provided no real benefit.

Once Traveller introduced standard contests, in MegaTraveller, I hacked the hell out of that game, making cyberpunk variations, fantasy variations, superspy variations, all with the background story that these mini-games were different worlds with varying tech levels within the Traveller framework.

But getting back to Burning Wheel, there was one thing that I really liked, and it was how the advancement system handled traits. Here's the rule, in case you've never played it. Every few sessions, one of the other players (could be the GM, but doesn't have to be) nominates a change to be made to your character's list of traits. And then there is a vote, which includes you, as to whether this change fits with how the character is being played or not. Do you see the genius of that? If your fellow player is playing a character as a bloodthirsty freak, you can nominate him for a trait like, scary murderer, and it can be used to penalize him in social circumstances. Players can punish each other for inconsiderate play, and reward each other for thoughtful play.

And Traveller has just been a big influence on me since I was a kid. The fact that the most you ever rolled were 3d6 is inspired in my mind. Whether I like it or not, I still measure games on the dollar store test. Can I get everything I need to play this game in a dollar store for a couple of bucks? If the answer is no, the game is somehow lessened in my mind even if it's Dogs in the Vineyard or Agon or Danger Patrol (just to mention a few amazing genius games that do not pass the dollar store test).

So I think Traveller is my favorite, with WHFRP coming close second in that it's influenced me a lot as a gamer and writer, and recently that mechanic from Burning Wheel has really inspired me and I'm going to try to include that mechanic or mechanics similar to that in more games that I may come up with in the future.

As far as favorite RPG settings, I think WH40K and Palladium's Ninjas and Superspies were the my favorites. WH40K was just inspired (inspired by what I would want to know, a very scary datura overdose?). And Ninjas and Superspies played like an episode of Aeon Flux. I actually miss Ninjas and Superspies quite a lot and wish one could find players for it. My Cyberpunk Revival Entry has a lot of the feel that I miss from Ninjas and Superspies in it.

[maledictus]

I really like the diceless Marvel Universe RPG, to bad it didn't get the atention it deserved.

And Call of Cthulhu is also one of my favorite games.

[Verdande]

I've really been digging Dark Heresy. Although I like the Career system in Warhammer Fantasy better, I'm already playing Labyrinth Lord and have a home-brewed system that I'm trying to play with my group. Three fantasy games is a recipe for burnout, so we're just playing LL and Dark Heresy at the moment.

I like Mutants and Masterminds' base idea, but I hate creating characters so, so, so much. It's like being back in the bad old days of 3rd edition D&D again, where every character is a "build" and you have to plan out all 20 levels before you make one level, except you're doing that all at once. And the character examples are all boring, too, which doesn't help. Ah, well, such is life.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[Rob Lang]

It's normally whatever I'm playing at the time. I think Paranoia has a place in my heart, as does Corporation - but only because Corporation is more up to date version of Cyberpunk 2020.

[koipond]

I'm a huge CyberGen fan, but I don't get to play that as much as I'd like and to be fair I'm getting a little more than burned out trying to carry it. I'll probably take a break for a year or two on it and work on other stuff. I love it though because it's a different way to do Cyberpunk, a different viewpoint. Sure it's based off of the CP 2020 timeline, but it's got it's own flavour and it's own feel.

I love Deliria, which is Urban Fairy Tales. I love it because the mechanic is rather handwavy a lot of the time, which I think is great for any game really. It fits how I like to run things and how I like to play.

[madunkieg]

I can get lost in the various themes found in Legend of the Five Rings (L5R). People complain that it's not historical, but if you look at it as a game setting, it's fantastic. There are so many themes intertwined, and so many different takes on each theme, that you can play for a very long time and still encounter new challenges.

The rules themselves are ho hum by my standards, but now that I'm playing Pathfinder/D&D again, I'm really missing all the ways that characters' struggles and personalities appear in character stats in L5R. In fact, it took me 5 tries to make a character concept that could be expressed within the D&D ruleset. I was just too used to having more depth in games like L5R.

Looking forwards to 4th ed and rebuying the books, because some of my old L5R books are falling apart.

[SheikhJahbooty]

Yogangs were so sweet they made me wonder why the PCs even got nanotech superpowers.

[vulpinoid]

All-Time Desert Island Top-5 Favourite Non-Free Roleplaying Games...

(The Five Gaming products I'd take to a Desert Island if I knew I'd be stranded there for the rest of my life...)

5. Cadwallon. Based on a miniatures game that was crafted by a group of European sculptors and artists who broke away from Games Workshop, this game takes a lot of the elements familiar to Warhammer players and makes them more fantastical and less dark. The game seems to have huge amounts of potential, but something appears to be lost in the translation from French to English (research indicates that the French version actually isn't much better). Still, it's got some great ideas in it, such as character stance determining initiative order, tactical miniatures combat (before 4th Ed D&D), and some really evocative races. It;s a shame that Rackham really took a turn for the worse after they released this game, with a few tweaks and errata I think it could have been a classic.

4. Norwegian Style. This one's a bit of a cheat because it's an anthology of short roleplaying games developed by a group of Norwegian Authors. There are many one shot games, with a wide variety of themes, subject matters and play styles.

3. A Penny for My Thoughts. It a great game that requires no preparation, it can easily be integrated into an existing campaign, it can be used as the starting point for a new campaign (I've done both of these), and it can work as a break from the usual. It can be as dark or light as your mood requires, and the game mechanics are easy for a non-roleplayer to get the hang of it in a matter of minutes.

2. RIFTs. Yeah, for "kitchen-sink"-ness you can go past the bloated behemoth that is RIFTs. It's one of those games where you can walk up to someone and say..."Imagine anything"...then..."do you want to play it?". I've lost track of the supplements after the first two dozen or so, but it still sits in my heart as a core of nostalgia.

1. Mage: the Ascension. I've played this so many times, ad hocced the rules to fit so many different genres and situations, it has a magic system based on a classic 1970's novel about enlightenment and philosophy (my favourite piece of reading material "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance").