I saw this topic on someone else's blog, and I thought it looked fun. I don't pretend to have played or be familiar with all of the major games that have been in print over the years, but I have played or read or at least am familiar with an awful lot. However, I'm also less and less attracted to mechanics and systems as time goes on. I mostly play D&Ds (with a pretty broad definition of what counts as a D&D) these days just because I don't care to mess around with different systems. And even the games that I'm going to list, if I were to play them again, I'd probably use them in a different system than the one that they've been originally written in. Maybe, anyway.
Let's start with a few fantasy games. I'm even more inclined to use a D&D for fantasy. Anything that's clearly derivative of D&D, like an OSR game or a d20 game, etc. counts as a D&D to me. That would include Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, 13th Age, ShadowDark and Knave 2e, and even my own DIY game, for that matter. So none of those count here; I'm looking a little bit beyond that for what I'm considering a "non-D&D" game.
1. WFRP: Warhammer is an interesting game. As mentioned above, I don't really much like complex or fiddly systems, and this is one that qualifies as too complex and too fiddly for me. However, the tone, the mood and the setting is what makes this one a winner. In general, I don't love games that are too closely tied to the setting, because I almost always tinker and modify it. WFRP is right up my alley in tone and mood, and there's a lot about the setting to use as is. The Enemy Within campaign is largely seen as one of the best written long-term campaigns out there; a real precursor to the adventure path methodology, written much like them, and one that really prioritizes investigation and intrigue over straight up combat. I'd even be willing to suffer through the system to play in this campaign... although I wouldn't run it personally myself.
2. Shadow of the Demon Lord: This game honestly does offer some pretty cool mechanics; kind of similar to D&D, but sufficiently cleaned up and streamlined that it doesn't feel like "a D&D." Like the above game, the tone and mood, as well as the implied setting is also a draw, although like with Warhammer, there are elements of the setting that I don't like (the countdown to the demon apocalypse being the main one.) If a game were to replace various versions of rules-light D&D variants for my fantasy gaming, this would probably be the one that I'd pick.
3. MERP: This is another system that I don't really love; and frankly, it's been replaced twice since it went out of print; once by a Decipher game based on the movie licenses, and one by a Cubicle 7 (now reverted to Free League) game that came out after that. Of the three, Middle-earth Roleplaying is both the most primitive in terms of mechanics and in terms of look and presentation, but it's also the most imaginative of the bunch. It's certainly quirky, and by quirky I mean that it often frustrated me by not really attempting to hit the tone and feel of Middle-earth and trending too often to "generic" D&D-like stuff. Then again, if I were to run Middle-earth again, I'd probably deliberately make it an alt.Middle-earth that's more sword & sorcery and was based on Tolkien's own brief discourse in the forward where he described what the story would be like if it were an allegory of WW2; i.e., Gandalf took the Ring from Bilbo and set himself up as a rival to Sauron and Saruman.
"Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Númenor and the gleaming cities, and the years of the Fourth Age, there was an Age undreamed of, when realms of Man lay spread across the world alongside those of fey Elves and sullen Dwarves like blue mantles beneath the stars. . . Hither came Aragorn of the Dúnedain, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a ranger, a wanderer, a chieftain, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the thrones of Arda under his feet."
- The Red Book of Westmarch
But I still found plenty to like reading all kinds of MERP books over the years, and I do still have an older copy of it in my stuff that I don't intend on getting rid of. I also have an art book that Iron Crown put out with all of their Angus MacBride Middle-earth art. Although honestly much of his historical art is higher quality, I still wouldn't get rid of that for the world.
4. Savage Worlds: Savage Worlds + Fantasy Companion would be fun; I actually think it would be better for certain settings like Eberron than D&D is—even though Eberron was specifically designed to be the 3.5 D&D setting, it feels like it really wants to be a Savage Worlds setting in some ways. And clearly, the Savage Pathfinder stuff seems to have been reasonably popular more recently. There's some other Savage World settings, like Totems of the Dead, for instance, that I really quite like. Maybe Savage Worlds would be another good alternative for any game, except that it's still a little rules-heavy and jargony for me for every day usage these days. I've lost my appetite for more mechanics and system that I used to have twenty years or so ago. There would have been a time when Savage Worlds could have replaced d20 maybe as my go-to "universal" system of choice, but it didn't quite happen, and now it's too late; that ship done sailed.
But rather than mention Savage Worlds below for modern and for space opera, I'll mention here that one of its big attractions is that as long as you mean a reasonably action-oriented or swashbucklery tone, Savage Worlds is a credible universal system that I could use for any genre. I'm actually going to be rereading it plus some of the companions here in a little bit, thinking about how I could still find a place for it in my gaming, potentially.
Honorable mentions: These games I'm not familiar enough to say. They look nice, but I've neither read them all the way through nor played them, although I'm somewhat familiar with how they play... a little, at least... and I'd potentially give them another whirl. These include EZD6 and Index Card RPG. The latter, in particular, seems great based on how I've had the game described to me, but I struggle to read it; it's written in a somewhat strange style, and is maybe a bit too radical for my taste. I dislike anything that uses cards or other "props" on principle. I've also played some BRP Cthulhu before, so I'd be willing to try another BRP or BRP-like game, such as RuneQuest or Mythras, although I'm not in any kind of hurry to do so.
Let's next have a look at modern games. This is actually a multi-genre designation, as broad as fantasy is, if not even moreso, and would include everything from 1920s-30s pulp, Westerns, Lovecraftian horror, modern spy thrillers, alternative history, or near future hard(ish) sci-fi, and everything in between. For here, I'm only going to pick three games, and all are games that I've played before and still own copies of.
5. Top Secret S.I.: I still quite like this game, although after I played it twice, I ran it, and realized that the game that I'd played was pretty heavily modified/streamlined by the GM... in exactly the way that I'd have done it, honestly. It's been many, many years, and I'd probably need to start from scratch remembering how to run the game... and I'd probably not bother, because I have other options (see Savage Worlds above, and the two coming up below) but I had a lot of fun with this system back in the day.
6. Call of Cthulhu: This is probably my absolute favorite, although I wouldn't use it for anything other than horror. And I like it better for past; but not too long in the past. ~100 years; back in the 20s—y'know, when Lovecraft actually wrote the stories (and he set them in what was for him at the time his "today"). I have an older version of the BRP game, 3rd edition, in good shape. I see Professor Dungeon Master of the Dungeon Craft channel is selling that same book in probably about the same condition for $100... maybe I should see what I can get for it! The d20 book, on the other hand, is probably my single favorite game book. I don't think that it's a great system, but it works well enough. And it's still both a beautiful book to look at, to read, and to peruse for GMing advice. I'll never get rid of that one.
Delta Green was the setting published by a third party (and now republished again for a different system) that was more modern and X-files/spies take on Lovecraftian horror. Super popular, and quite interesting, but I admit to preferring a more classic Lovecraftian time-period for Call of Cthulhu, and modern games being more like Dresden Files or Supernatural.
7. d20 Modern: The first attempt at a universal system that I took seriously (GURPS was never up my alley—not actiony or swashbuckling enough. Although I think it worked better for more investigative or horror genres, it still wasn't likely to ever be my go-to option. And the Hero System was always way too crunchy). I'd probably prefer Savage Worlds if I needed one now, but I had a lot of fun using this for a variety of games, and entertaining it for games that I didn't actually run or play. I even created a fantasy equivalent to try and get away from the D&Disms... after I did that, WotC released d20 Past which covered much of the same ground. Dark•Heritage, the predecessor to Dark Fantasy X was actually "meant" to be run with d20 Modern + d20 Past Shadow Stalkers campaign model rules for a time. They were options that I could "turn on" as is without many house-rules that did the job credibly well, until I decided that d20 was too rules-heavy for my taste after all. Although, with a group that didn't have any power-gamers or rules-lawyers, I could still have tons of fun running d20 Modern.
Some of my favorite d20 Modern games were convention one-shots where I adapted "Exit 23", the scenario included in Alternity's Dark•Matter campaign setting (where I got the affectation for years that I wrote Dark•Heritage with a • —because Dark•Matter did it first, and Dark•Matter was cool! In fact all of the old Alternity settings were kinda sorta adapted into d20 Modern, as well as plenty of other older TSR properties, such as Star Frontiers, etc. which was another pretty cool point in its favor. Although they didn't go much with these; you'd still need your original material to effectively run them. d20 Modern was also the mechanical chassis for all, or at least most, of the Polyhedron mini-games, quite a few of which were really pretty awesome, like Hi-jinks, the Scooby-doo game (kinda), Iron Lords of Jupiter, a Barsoom-like game, Omega World, a Gamma World rip-off, etc. And Dark•Matter was cool enough that it got published as only one of two full-blown campaign settings for d20 Modern; the other was Urban Arcana, which was D&D in the modern age; probably the literally least interesting concept that they did. Sigh.
I still have a lot of really fond memories of d20 Modern and could probably pretty easily be prevailed upon to use it to run all kinds of different things... but again, only if the people I'm playing with don't mind me playing pretty fast and loose with the rules, because there's way too many.
Honestly, Savage Worlds would probably do everything d20 Modern can do, and probably better, but I'm very familiar with d20 Modern, and not as familiar with Savage Worlds, which I've only played a few times and don't remember very well.
Lastly, science fiction, futuristic, specifically space opera would be next. As an aside, I could easily use d20 Modern for this, and d20 Modern in fact published several books that supported this, including d20 Future, d20 Apocalypse and d20 Cyberscape and an equipment book called d20 Future Tech. However, because I already picked d20 Modern above, I'll just mention that here and move on to other games:
8. Star Wars: There's been a lot of different Star Wars games. the old West End Games d6 system Star Wars game actually contributed a lot of material that was eventually "canonized" such as it is. Any of the Star Wars games would probably work relatively well, but what I'm most familiar with is the d20 Star Wars. In fact, I have two (of three that were released) versions of it; the original and the Revised. It was later revised again to the "Saga" version, which is generally believed to be the best one, but I wasn't interested in buying a third copy of a game that I still hadn't actually played.
Now, I did play quite a bit of d20 Star Wars, but it wasn't the "official" d20 Star Wars; some guy in our group just modified D&D to be Star Wars. It was very similar, and I didn't see the point, since it wasn't that hard to just go buy the official d20 Star Wars, but maybe he just really didn't want to spend the money, so he reinvented the wheel to get almost the exact same result. I also spent a fair bit of time creating a Star Wars Remixed setting that was set a thousand years after Return of the Jedi and ignored a lot of stuff from the EU, and the sequel movies as they started coming out. Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't be interested anymore in doing that. I eventually even took the "serial numbers" off of my version of the Star Wars setting, and as I did, it became much less tethered to anything specifically Star Warsy. I could even run the Space Opera X setting happily, but I haven't given a ton of thought as to what system I'd prefer to do that with anymore. My old m20 adaptation should be brought up to date as modern and future universal games based on DFX, actually.
Wow, there's a whole big project that I just thought of. Ooof.
9. Traveller: I actually have three versions of this game too, although there are more than three or four times that many that have actually been in print. I have the old Classic Traveller black book (plus some supplemental stuff), I have the MegaTraveller boxed set (plus some other MegaTraveller stuff) and I bought T20, the d20 version of it, as well. Again; after owning three versions of a game that I still haven't played, I wasn't interested in buying any more, but the Mongoose Traveller was well received. I doubt I'd play Traveller again anymore, but even in Space Opera X I did take a lot of ideas from the game, especially the method of space-mapping and the system data sheets (mine are streamlined, of course. Actual Traveller has had a lot of detail that is nerdy and nobody cares about.)
10. Stars Without Number: A relatively newer entry, this is a tremendous toolkit. I wouldn't be interested in actually playing it, but no matter what game you actually play, it has stuff that you can use. Anyone who does any kind of space opera gaming should own a copy.
Honorable Mentions for Modern and Future: I've enjoyed reading games like Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX). Evil Hat seems to do decent work, or at least pretty work. Their Spirit of the Century is still one of my favorite RPG covers. Who doesn't love a gorilla flying a bi-plane and fighting a Dr. Doom lookalike on the wing while a flaming dirigible looms directly overhead? The Dresden Files game was a fun read, but I've never tried to run it. I have fond memories of Star Frontiers and Gamma World, and Alternity's Star*Drive. I was for a few years pretty invested in the Storyteller system, and still own a bunch of Werewolf books in particular, although I wouldn't have any interest in either the system or the settings either one today. White Wolf is the company that turned me forever against pretentiousness in gaming, against metaplot, and against games that are too tightly bound to a setting.
There's no doubt many other one-offs that I could possibly be prevailed upon to play, or even systems or settings that were relatively big in their day, but which are kind of forgotten anymore, like Legend of the Five Rings or 7th Sea. If I ever want to play superheroes, Mutants & Masterminds would be my go-to, but again, I have the first version; it's been revised multiple times, I believe. Obviously, I don't really play supers...
But now I'm lingering in the long tail, way past the ten (or so) games that I'd call any kind of favorite, so it's probably time to wrap this one up.
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