(RPG Geekery) 20 years on..

[SirFozzie]

1991. Bad hair everywhere. The Twins and Braves in the World Series. Michael Jordan and the Bulls beat Magic Johnson and the Lakers. I was a teenager

And the first edition of Vampire The Masquerade came out.

And now, 20 years on: the first PDF copies of the re-release of the expanded Vampire Masquerade game (called V20 because it's the 20th anniversary edition) are headed out, ahead of the physical book release next month.

And I'm downloading it (pre-orders got a link today)

[MacroGuru]

Wow...was it really 20 years ago? Hell, my first VtM character was a Brujah gang banger that just loved to wreck shit....

It was a definite fun time.

[SirFozzie]

Heh. There was two types of groups who played VTM in my area.. one was the typical goths who played it as the woe is me darkness is my soul pathos game that it originally was..

The other group played it more like it was a John Woo "Fangs with uberpowers" game..

want to guess which group I hung out with more?

[GrantDawg]

I loved that game, but never got to play it as much as I would have liked.

[Apathetic Lurker]

I was AD& D all the way, with Rolemaster, Harn,top Secret thrown in..Never could get into Vampire..too many weirdos played it......

[GrantDawg]

I was AD& D all the way, with Rolemaster, Harn,top Secret thrown in..Never could get into Vampire..too many weirdos played it......


Ha ha! Top secret. There is a game I haven't thought of in forever. How about Paranoia? Boy, I miss that game.

[Apathetic Lurker]

TS was my game..I created some of the weirdest, twisted scenarios when I ran TS.....hmmm maybe I should have ran Paranoia...lol

[MacroGuru]

I still have my TS, Paranoia, MERP, Warhammer FRP plus the originial Twilight 2K...

My boys have been thumbing through my books asking about them and my 11 year old is wanting to play...

[GrantDawg]

I still have my TS, Paranoia, MERP, Warhammer FRP plus the originial Twilight 2K...

My boys have been thumbing through my books asking about them and my 11 year old is wanting to play...


Twilight 2k! Played that more than any other besides D&D.

[MacroGuru]

What about Star Frontiers and Traveller? Anyone play a lot of those?

[GrantDawg]

What about Star Frontiers and Traveller? Anyone play a lot of those?


Both. (I worked for a hobby store with a game room. Very few things I didn't play). Loved Star Frontiers, but Traveller was game that was more fun making characters than actually playing. :)

[Apathetic Lurker]

Twilight 2k! Played that more than any other besides D&D.

Made me nostalgic......Especially for Frenchie, the ex French Foreign Legionnaire with his old Indian motorcycle........sigh..good times...good times...except for that damn BO that built up when 7 or so people played rpgs for 10 hours straight(including pizza, beer, subs and vodka) in a dorm room.....

[Warhammer]

You can play these great RPGs and more a GameCon Memphis in a week!

Yeah, had to plug it.

Seriously though, Paranoia was great fun. As one GM used to say, you weren't playing it right if everyone hadn't died twice before they were figuring out what to do.

[SirFozzie]

That's if you're playing zap style.

That would be fun, running a FOFC game of Paranoia XP (or now known as Paranoia Troubleshooters, thanks to a certain company objecting that will be unidentified, but generally known as Micro$oft :)

Actually, there's three versions of Paranoia now, Troubleshooters, Internal Security, and High Programmers.. I *REALLY* want to run a game of High Programmers some day.

[Honolulu_Blue]

I played a ton of various RPGs in my time. There are quite a few games that I don't even remember what they are called.

I first played Dungeons and Dragons when I was six years old. 31 years later, I still play, though not nearly as much as I'd like.

While I can't list all of the various games I played the main ones are:

1. D&D. I've been playing this for 31 years. So many different campaigns and characters. Dozens and dozens. The two biggest were a 4 year campaign that started at the end of high school and finished at the end of college before our GM moved to Atlanta. The other is a current campaign that's been running since 2006. We only play a handful of times a year, unfortunately, because everyone is so spread out. Both campaigns were set in wholly original worlds. I will never play 4th Edition D&D. Ever.

2. Call of Chthulu. Played one mega campaign that was glorious. It's a module, though I forget the name. Fun campaign. Takes you all over the world and you encounter a wonderful sampling of the mythos. We all went insane in the end, of course. Since then, I've played a bunch of Chthulhu one shots and ran a Chthulhu tournament at GenCon for a while.

3. Vampire The Masquerade. I played a Vampire campaign that started in my freshmen year at college, 1992. We played it for a couple of years. It was great. I loved it. I played a newly made Brujah who was a cop who got bit during a drug bust. The campaign had a ton of really cool ideas and concepts. A great GM.

4. All Flesh Must Be Eaten. This is another on-going campaign. Zombie survival. Fast zombies. We only play about once or twice a year. It's a lot of fun.

5. Kult. This was one of the most memorable campaigns I have ever played. To be honest, I have no idea how much of the system we actually ever used since I don't recall ever looking at the game book. I don't remember how long the campaign was, but we were in college. We all just made random characters. There was a doctor (me), an IRA terrorist, an artist, a wealthy, yet sickly socialite and maybe one more. We are all drawn to this one location in London that was a warehouse that was built around an old well. The well was the key and started to trigger flashbacks. We all had various group flashbacks to different times. We were always together. Sometimes the flashbacks took place in the past and sometimes in the future. It was great how the GM would give us a brief sketch of who we were in that time and we just ran with it.

Slowly, over the course of the campaign, it was finally revealed to us that we were each a representative of some sort of celestial plane. If I recall, one of us (or a NPC) represented: heaven, hell, the abyss, dreams, nature and technology. The Creator (god) had gone down to Earth because he wanted to live a human life, to experience his finest creation. We were all sent down to make him remember who he was before he died so when he died, he'd go back to his celestial seat instead of simply being reincarnated like the rest of the human souls and living his next life. Before we could do so, Technology killed us all and we were all recycled. This happened over and over and over and over again and explained why technology was overtaking society at the cost of everything else. It was pretty amazing how the whole thing unfolded.

In addition to those, we played a TON of Villains & Vigilantes in high school. We also played two or three major "Nightlife" campaigns, which was a rough around the edges pre-cursor to Vampire. I liked it so much that I actually wrote a (very bad) novel about our first Nightlife campaign.

We also played a fair share of Boot Hill, Star Wars, Shadow Run, Robotech, Battletech/Mechwarrior, Top Secret, Twilight 2000, Mutant Chronicles and probably a few more I can't quite remember.

[Drake]

MERP!

(My 13 y.o. just pulled out my original MERP box set this week and asked if I could teach him how to play it.)

[DataKing]

AD&D, Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Twilight 2000, Top Secret, Paranoia, MERP, Traveler 2000, Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Battletech, Robotech, Star Wars (West End), Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, Earthdawn, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Rifts, Runequest, Dark Conspiracy...

Those were the days...

[DanGarion]

AD&D, Werewolf and VtM. Champions, Exhaulted, Star Wars d20, plain ol d20. Let's see what else. Marvel Super Heroes, Muntants and Masterminds. I'm sure there are some other things as well.

[Marc Vaughan]

I think I played nearly all of the above - plus some RPG's which I designed myself before D&D really penetrated the shores of the UK (I first discovered the concept through the book 'Hobgoblin' and was fascinated enough to design my own for my friends and I to play).