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Derailed ...
Anyway, I remember a fun D&D moment when my lovely players, who were 13th level at the time (this was a 3E game), went into a dungeon and ran into three Kobolds around a campfire. One of the players uttered, "Ah, they're only Kobolds ..." and charged in with two other characters in tow.
They started whacking the Kobolds and they weren't going down.
Then, the Kobolds all turned into werewolves and proceeded to infect the three characters with lycanthropy.
Best thing ... the player's didn't make the lycanthropy connection and didn't get that taken care of at the end of the session. Know what they did the very next session? Got on a boat for a multi-week trip to another continent.
Yeah ... fun times.
Then there was the time in a Ravenloft game where my character's ring of spell-turning turned a disintegrate spell back on Azalin and turned him to dust in the first round of combat ...
I was a complete
nutcase.
My first EVER purchased game was Cyberpunk 2020 the same day I bought DC Heroes and blanched at the rules for that. I moved around a lot until I found West End Games' Star Wars RPG & Vampire The Masquerade.
I actually ended up on White Wolf's own RPG server, firstly as a player (I found it by accident one evening in work, and since I worked 1-9pm and after 7 it was completely dead in work, I used to play then). Eventually, I started GM'ing, and from their, wound up as an official moderator of the game until it's end which was done by played out Gehenna.... (The Tremere chantry pretty much self destructed, leaving my own character spread out across the grounds..
The good news is, I've just (yesterday) discovered that there's a functioning game club nearby and plan to wander down tomorrow.
Game Club
That's really cool. One thing I've never done was join any organized group, short of the chess and special games club at my school. I'm part of the Pen and Paper website and they have section where you can join up with groups in your area that post there, but I've never had the nerve or the time to look into it.
I'd be curious to hear how your trip goes.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
It was...
An experience.
6 and a half hour game session which was pretty much wasted playtesting a new concept. *hangs head* Gods save me from teenagers that have no concept of staying on topic.
The good(???) news is it's got me thinking about a Vampire chronicle set in London. I've already got the power structure sorted out, Now I need a good map of London.
Yeah, Marvel was great to
Yeah, Marvel was great to start out on. The system is still in use today, but, obviously not officially for Marvel. It's free, for all the wonderfulness of it all. You can also find a number of PDFs of the old Marvel RPG books here. Don't worry, it's all completely legal to my knowledge. I remember that old chart. Unearthly, Monstrous, Class 1000 ... heh. But the thing I loved about it was three simple words ... Ultimate Powers Book. Hours of character creation fun!
I never played the DC game, being that I was a Marvel brat and believed that nothing good came from DC. Looking at the state of the comics universes today ... I find that I am entirely justified in my opinion.
Paranoia was another fun one, and Star Wars D6.
The only Palladium I ever had any experience with was TMNT and Other Strangeness and Robotech. Big fan of both, but not of the Palladium system.
Anyone heard of Feng Shui? Absolutely great, great, great game. It's the only game I can honestly tell you is as fun to run as it is to play. I highly recommend it. Cybernetic Gorillas from the future. Ninjas. Guys who can leap 15 meters in a single bound. Hordes of mooks. Anyone seen a Hong Kong Action Movie? Yeah. Imagine a world like that. Now turn it up to "11."
Marvel Books
The books aren't listed there yet. So far, it looks like they only have the old Marvel-Philes that were listed in Dragon Magazine. I have to give TSR a lot of credit. They produced an incredible amount of material to support the game, both in module and supplement form and then added to that with the Marvel-Phile. I miss those days.
Hell, I miss the days of new First Edition D&D material being produced.
God, could you imagine a podcast on D&D back then?
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
A Podcast on D&D
(first, scroll to the bottom of that page, John, and you'll find the book links.)
There was something similar to a podcast back in the day with a "stone knives and bearskin" discussion conducted over (wait for it)... CB radio.
Easy bound and down, 10-4.
I Stand Corrected
Actually, I'm sitting with my feet up as I'm still creaking with the back and now my right calf is hurting. But thanks, I did find the links. I completely missed out on how well they separated the links according to types of modules as per their codes. Very nice.
Still, there are plenty of podcasts out there about D&D, but they all focus on the third and fourth edition rules. And there are podcasts on various game sessions themselves, something I've been meaning to listen in on. Gamer's Haven releases podcasts of the sessions of various games they run.
I'd still love to hear a podcast of a gaming session from a first edition game.
Hmmm, I'm thinking audio drama here. I'm thinking a group of early eighties gamers in the middle of a marathon session so they're starting to get loopy or high on Mountain Dew and Funyons. Someone brings up the fact that TSR is going to release a second edition and farce ensues as they argue the merits of an updated system.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
Class 1000
That was when they ran out of what Jay called, "Stan Lee" adjectives. They needed something for the Thors and Hulks of the Marvel universe.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
But Class 1000 wasn't
But Class 1000 wasn't enough! In the advanced edition, we have Class 5000 and even BEYONDER. At that point, the only way to fail at basic feats was to roll a 1 and not have any Karma...but with anywhere between 3000-15000 karma, that was REALLY unlikely.
Advanced Set
I don't know if I ever got the advanced set. I still have it all in a box downstairs. Sue's going out with the boys this morning so I think I'll go exploring...
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
If I remember correctly, the
If I remember correctly, the basic set was a yellow box, and the advanced set was a blue box.
The Ultimate Powers Book gave you many many more powers to choose from.
I remember the game had the option for random character creation. Now that was hours of fun.
I have several wonderful
I have several wonderful memories of gaming moments of yester-year ... but I will not bore you with them all.
When I first got into gaming, I was in the fifth grade. My older brother called me into his room and handed me a boxed set to the Marvel Super Heroes RPG from TSR at the time. He said, "Enjoy these, you will."
(Okay, he was less Yoda-like about it, but I'm telling the story, so deal with it.)
Then, he pointed at a book that was clearly labeled RIFTS ... and told me to never play that game.
I have heeded his advice on the matter ever since.
There are many more, like the time an impromptu D&D game broke out when my three friends prodded me into running a session of our D&D campaign on a Sunday night ... and we gamed from 8PM to 8AM straight. Oh, and there was no combat at all during that session ... it was all roleplaying.
Ah ... good times.
First Gaming Experience
I was in the fourth grade and visiting a friend. He pulled out the Basic D&D set. This was before they even made the dice and I pulled numbers from envelopes to determine my stats and combat rolls. I was an Elf who went into the Keep of the Borderlands on my own. I was wiped out after two encounters, but I was hooked.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
Loved It
Loved the old Marvel RPG game. I had an Avengers campaign where many of the Avengers were missing and the remaining ones were trying to find them while figuring out the role of a metahuman girl in all of it.
I used to do 24 hour D&D sessions with some friends in high school. Don't think this 40+ could handle that now. What do you say, Dave, up for an all-nighter?
Wait, that didn't sound right.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
Oh man... all-nighters and
Oh man... all-nighters and marathon sessions. PIles of Domino's Pizza boxes, sword fighting with empty 2-liter bottles, Jolt cola in cans, the smell of Pop Tarts, pizza and BO.
The only 2 games that we could keep going that long were Twlight:2000 and AD&D. In sections, we could do Call of Cthulhu (no character ever lasted 24 hours of straight game time)
Can you
PLEASE refrain from setting up your sordid trysts on this forum?
Next thing you know, there'll be a "singles or Swingers" forum topic..
I absolutely LOVE the old
I absolutely LOVE the old Marvel RPG. I still have the books and modules. I loved the way it was set up in that you had Stan Lee's hyperbolic adjectival vocabulary as the basis for power levels, that the rules were simple and allowed you to focus on the story and the action rather than the hyper-mathematics. It was also very cool to be able to play one of my favorite heroes in a campaign and kick the snot out of The Brood (I was Wolverine before being Wolverine was cool) and my favorite game was playing a buddy's own modified SECRET WARS. Our Avengers campaign team looked more like the New Avengers with Wolverine, Spiderman and Luke Cage.
I didn't play Rifts at first. I actually started Palladium rules with "Beyond the Supernatural" which dovetailed nicely into Rifts. The ONLY thing that really bugged me about that system was megadamage. The first time a Megadamage weapon fell into the hands of an enemy and no one had Megadamage armor...it was game over.
The Beyond the Supernatural campaign I ran incorporated rules from Ninjas and Superspies and other Palladium add-ons. I had rules to take players out to sea or into space or another dimension and the story didn't get bogged down with obsessive rules lawyering like you find with AD&D.
Were you...
me?
I also had N&S and BTS. Didn't play it much to be honest though, I spent more time creating test characters ::)
Character creation
Yeah. It took a good half hour to roll up a character in BTS/Rifts. But once it was done, the rules were pretty straight forward. I played an AD&D game recently where my character sheet was three pages in 8-point font and each combat round too 15 minutes. It's like watching an exciting movie where the actual frames are slowed down and the director talks about how the scene was shot.
Oh Gods
Marvel Super Heroes, *looks over into the corner at my RPG shelves* Where you needed two charts on the back to figure out stuff.
At least it was a little easier than DC Heroes from Mayfair *shudder* That game was INSANE I mean, you needed a wheel chart to figure out if your character could pick up a newspaper :)
"That game was INSANE I
"That game was INSANE I mean, you needed a wheel chart to figure out if your character could pick up a newspaper :)"
ROTFL. And the funniest part is...it's TRUE. I was 14 when I picked up this game, looked at the comparison charts and thought "WTF is this, Calculus?" I like games where the rules facilitate the game play. I ended up creating a DC to Marvel conversion chart and played DC Heroes the Marvel Way. :)
I was also a big fan of Ghostbusters (GBI). I think that franchise is ripe for an update in RPG form.
Gamma World
No real memory to offer as it's been ages since I played, but lately I've been thinking how I'd love to run a Gamma World campaign. I'm thinking it could be a continuation of a my Realm of Correu in D&D. I'd call it Wastelands of Correu.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
Hmmmm ...
Wastelands of Correu? Is that a threat? Isn't a world filled with monsters and zombies kind of wasteland-ish already? Unless you're planning to make it WORSE somehow ...
Or perhaps I'm misreading this whole thing and you're planning a T.S. Eliot Waste Land environment in which we read long passages aloud to each other for days on end until we're all either very enlightened or very depressed.
Wastelands of Correu
Gamma World is set in a post-apocalyptic future. Think Mad Max or even Thundarr the Barbarian. Many thousands of years after the gods abandoned Correu and people determined their own destiny (which included a devastating world war), a group of survivors set out across the wastelands of Correu in search of adventure, power, brains - who knows?
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
A Doctor Who Role Playng Moment
In a game with Keith and Judy as Doctor and D&D type companion. They are facing off against this ravager of time, a huge demon. He refuses to listen to anything the Doctor has to say about the effects he has having on the time stream. He's enjoying the chaos. The Doctor makes one final threat, but knows he is limited in what he can do. He reaches into the pocket of his long coat and pulls out a yo-yo (randomly rolled). The demon laughs at the idea of the Doctor using a toy.
The Doctor flicks the yo-yo a few times before lining up a shot and whizzing the yo-yo right between the eyes of the demon. Keith rolls and manages to stun the beast, sending him crashing to the ground. They mop up the operations from there.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
that was classic....
And only in a Who RPG could you score a critical hit with a yo-yo. *falls over laughing*
Keith R.A. DeCandido | keith@decandido.net | kradical.livejournal.com | Facebook.com/kradec | Twitter.com/kradec
"Even when you turn your back, you're still facing something."
A Dungeons and Dragons Moment
One of my favorite memories was when I was running two games in the same realm. One group was on the evil side and the other was on the good side. The evil side made their presence known in the realm and got the attention of the good side. The good side made it a point to track down the bad guys and in a fantastic gaming session, the two games met in combat.
I brought the players together for the session. They entered from opposute sides of a large room and sat at a large gaming table. The players placed their gaming figures on the table and the next hour was a strategy session as they argued amongst themselves in each camp, trying to get the most out of the situation while attaining the least damage.
Good managed to just win the conflict - just.
Good times. Good times.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
The Time...
A long time ago... in a country far far away.
The game - Cyberpunk 2020
The Character - a Media anchorman
The location - Night City, at the wrong end of the wrong end of town, right on the wrong side of the tracks.
The Problem - a lone Media, in a suit, with a very small handgun against a ripper gang.
The solution - A scene from Blazing Saddles. "Stay away from him or I'll shoot him" whilst aiming handgun at own head.
The accident - As the media is dragging himself backwards, threatening to kill himself, he accidently bangs his elbow against a wall (bad bad BAD dice!!!) causing himself to attempt a self-lobotomy by firearm.
The aftermath - No hair, metal plate in head & a group of players sitting around in astonishment (followed by hysterical laughter)
Cyberpunk 2020
Do you remember who produced that game? I never played it, but heard a lot about it.
John
Creator, Producer, All Around God-Like Being
"What? Too much?"
I think you'll find
It was R Talsorian Games ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020)
Excellent game, even though it was sometimes more fun to create the most whacked out cyborg possible (What do you mean I can't have rippers AND wolvers??, why CAN'T I have four legs??, what do you mean "No, you can't have a full borg conversion into a walking tank!")