Do you play pencil&paper RPGs?

Title should be fairly self explainitory. If you're got a favorite, post about it here. Inquiring minds want to know...or at least one mind does.

I've played some D&D but my personal favorite continues to be PARANOIA...heck, I heard about Second Life from someone on a PARANOIA message board (www.paranoia-live.net) on the grounds that the person who discovered it found he could make gadgets just as wierd and wacky as the type often found in PARANOIA games.

I've played D&D 2nd and 3rd editions, Wheel of Time, and Rifts.

I enjoyed Rifts and Wheel of Time more than D&D, but I never have anyone to play them with.

I play Rolemaster

Once and a while, maybe twice a year, I get together with my brother and some old friends from our teen RPG years and we play. Last time we played D&D, and next time we will be playing Gamma World (my old fave), which I will be GMing. We used to get together much more often 20 or 25 years ago, but it really seems to be more fun now. We can have an alcoholic beverage or two and get a little crazy!

Yes.

More systems and setting than I care to list.

I have bookshelves, plural, of nothing but RPG books. And I mean those standard 6 foot high shelves you get at walmart.

I played D&D, V:tM, Starwars, and Jovian Chronicles.

My favorite though was an old one called "Aftermath." Post-apocalyptic survival stuff. Really neat.

What is it and how do you play?

I play D&D 3.5

Aftermath was a great game! I still have it and most of the supplements.

I've played D&D, Runequest (an all time favorite), Aftermath, Rolemaster, Space Opera (anyone remember that?), Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Into The Labyrinth (my first RPG....really simple but well done), Gamma Wolrd, Twilight 2000, Call of Cthulhu, The Morrow Project, Paranoia, Judge Dredd, Land of the Rising Sun (talk about a headache inducing rule system), and probably 20 more I've forgotten.

But that was all long ago. Not much time for it these days.

Now this brings back memories. At the summer camp I used to go to maybe 15 years ago or so, there was this counselor named Max who had invented an RPG he called Quest. The plot was different every year (always brilliant) while the gameplay itself remained the same. A group of us would meet a few times a week to let Max guide us through the never-ending adventures of our characters through Max's imagined worlds. (Well, almost never-ending. I did once manage to get my pointed-eared, bug-eyed, mutant human/chameleon character's chest stomped in by an insane experimental government super-soldier, but hey, c'est la vie.)

Quest was truly the highlight of camp, and I miss it. Max, old buddy, if you're out there somewhere, send up a flare or something. I'm itching for more Quest.

i used to play V:tM. sad really.......

I'm refereering a play by email (PBEM) game of Traveller, it's a nice side project. I found, last month, all my original manuals (~1981), and we're currently doing the mission "The Argon Gambit". I liked and continue to like Traveller as it's so very based on die roles, one player, for example, has such low endurance that he collapses often while in stressful situations; he hates it but that's how life is.

When I was in college, I was in a D&D group that got together every Sunday morning at 9am (usually with hangovers) and played all day. We had a blast, usually using tons of caffeine and cannibis to cure our hangovers while slaying monsters and dealing with our palace intrigue.

I put D&D on the shelf for many, many years until my kids got to be teenagers. I went out and bought the new 3rd Edition books, and now we have much fun 2 or 3 times a month. I can still send my son running from the room in terror when I role play a particularly gruesome and evil "encounter".

- Ace

I used to be a huge AD&D, GURPs, and Shadowrun player in college. Notsomuch anymore (computer games)

Oh, alright. Since everyone else is, I'll post some of my favorites. This doesn't mean what I've played or own, just the subset of those that I really really like

Ars Magica
AD&D 2nd Edition (3rd? Baaaaah... )
Hackmaster
Werewolf: The Appocolypse
Mage: The Ascention
Changeling: The Dreaming
Mage: The Sorcerer's Crusade
Sorcerer
Dark Ages: Fae
Exalted
Adventure!
Shadowrun
Ironclaw/Jadeclaw
Jovian Chronicals
Gamma World, or Darwin's World if I have to play D20
Legend of the Five Rings
BESM
Fading Suns

My favorite DnD settings that aren't homebrew are Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Midnight, and Kalamar.

WOOT! What RPGs *don't* I play? Lesse, I've done D&D (all flavors), GURPS, just about everything from White Wolf, Buffy VTS, Star Wars, RIFTS, Cyberpunk, BESM, Boot Hill, Spycraft, 7th Sea, Call of Cthulu...

My favorite little known game is All Fleash Must Be Eaten. Getting to play a cheerleader with a shotgun blowing up hordes of zombies is tons of fun.

Rifts... *shudder*

*twitches in convlusions, dies*

*comes back to life as a 17th level Cosmo Knight and kills everything in the universe*

I only played All Flesh Must be Eaten a couple times. It was fun, but I couldn't see playing it terribly long term. I played a chinese tourist, trapped in New York City when the zombie invasion began. Good times. My "Pestacide squirter filled with gasoline with a zippo taped on the end" flamethrower was a blast too

Bahhh? I much prefer a standardized ruleset, as opposed to a system where the rules drastically change every other book, and where adherence to the rules requires that one look up umpteen values in a dozen tables in 4 or 5 different books. I started with 2E, and I thought it was a great system, even after 3E had come out. In the end, though, I think the D20 system is a far better system. Not that it doesn't have its own major flaws.

As far as settings go, I'm a sucker for Forgotten Realms and Al Qadim, which has never been officially updated for D20. I loved the Dragonlance novels when I was younger, but I was never a huge fan of the setting for gameplay.

As far as new settings go: am I the only one who absolutely hates Eberron? In the hype leading up to its release, I was absolutely enthralled with some of the ideas I'd heard about. However, the setting ended up being not so stellar, not so revolutionary, and rather immature. I appreciate the fact that WoTC is pursuing new settings, but I'm disappointed that they chose this setting. Ideally, I think they should have pursued a couple of the best ideas, instead of focusing all of their energy into the one world.

Oh let's see...

The two big ones that I played the most were AD&D 2nd Ed. and Star Wars RPG (D6 WEG)

Others I have played:

Millennium's End
Top Secret: SI
Rifts
Shadowrun
Cyberpunk
Twilight 2000

Don't mind the curmudgeon

I actually like the D20 system alot. I don't like the gameplay that tends to result from it, though. It just doesn't feel as fun, to me. This is why I like Hackmaster... It's 2E, with some of the silly rules improved (THAC0 becomes a more logical AC, for example) and standardized, not spread across 562,253,123 books. It's basicly an alternate-reality 3E.

But on the flipside, I've played 2E successfully for years. Just only use the three core books, and then possibly the core book of whatever setting your playing in. That eliminates the rules clutter.



I'm ashamed to admit I conceptually like Forgotten Realms, though as with most things, I think the update to 3E kinda hosed it. I liked it alot better in it's earlier days. Before, ya know... Drizzt.

Al Qadim is teh kewl, but I rarely find people willing to play it. The closest I can normally get is meeting them half way with Dark Sun. Or setting something in Calimport in Forgotten Realms.

Dragonlance is hard to play as a setting, yes. Because the metaplot is so constantly changing. I struggled with this for years. Then I realized, "Everything I like about Dragonlance is existed back in the Age of Dreams, too. So I'll set stuff there, where I have centuries and centuries without any metaplot to screw with my creations."

I hate new "God's are gone and magic is fading and psionics rules the day" Dragonlance. It's a great setting. But it's not Dragonlance. If WotC wanted a "Old gods are gone, magic is dying, new magic is being developed" setting, they shoulda made one, not bastardized Dragonlance.



I don't like Eberron as a whole, but I like a lot of the concepts. I like the fact that they tried to explore a natural-ish evolition of a magical world, instead of the usual "Middle Ages with Magic" type settings. I like the new portrayals of elves and dwarves and such, if only because they are innovative. But the setting as a whole, I'll pass on.

Midnight, which was one of the other settings they were possibly considering (From the World Design Contest) turned out to be a far, far superior setting in my mind.

I write and publish D&D and other D20 games.

What can I say? I'm a man of many skills...

Swanky!

I tried to write a few things for publication, but outside of an artical in ENWorld Magazine I've never really finished anything to the point I was ready to publish it.

Seriously!? Oh wow... I can't find the aftermath stuff anywhere. I don't suppose you have them converted to pdf's?

I've tried; so far Star Wars D20, Shadowrun, Mechwarrior, D&D and some rather strange freeform stuff. Unfortunately no one I know has been interested enough to play anything regularly, and I've never thought I was very good at it. Of course, now some of the few people I know locally are playing D&D regularly, but never invited me.

Does tic-tac-toe count?