D&D 5th Edition

[DanJ]

I missed everything from AD&D to 5th so don't know how bad they were.  As so much in RPGs it depends on the DM & Players; we're very lucky in having a set of long standing friends non of whom are power gamers.

After 18 months of play we've got to 5th level; personally I think D&D is best between 5th and 9th level, lower than that party members can be killed by relatively low level incidents or unlikely dice combinations, higher than that the party becomes too powerful.

Also the DM is keeping magic in very short supply which helps prevent it dominating the campaign.

[FierceKitty]

No voices raised for RuneQuest? I always thought that looked pretty good.

[Fenton]

Runequest was excellent though it did fall apart a bit when Runelord were fighting runelords as everyones attack and defence were so high it was almost impossible to kill anyone

One of my favourites was MERP/Rolemaster ..Excellent system that could be used for anything...Nice set of modules and campaign settings released as well covering all of middle earth

I havent played Harn in about 30 years but remembering it being good

[toxicpixie]

Yeah tried a couple of sessions of "Harnmaster" and went back to Headdenquest (my home grown version of SPI's Dragonquest), when characters die from infected wounds more often than fatal sword thrusts or deadly arrow fire the pendulum has swung way too far to the "realism" side for my tastes.

My brief foray into the Star Wars RPG, as a character, saw a group of characters so amoral that the GM eventually caved and let us be Imperials rather than Rebels.

Yeah, Harn was a really nice idea but not great fun to play long term. "I am the heroic hero of heroicness, and, nope, wait, put the pen knife down, aaahhhhh a splinter! Get it away!" And this is coming from a man who played Rolemaster. Ahhh the heady days of stumbling over imaginary unseen deceased invisible turtles and breaking your hip. So many decapitations or bleed outs. Happy times.

"Amoral" - I once ran a mini-campaign in Basic D&D where the characters turned out to be... well, not only did they get the authorities after them, but they murdered the Thieves Guild agent who was carrying them out the city in a wagon. One of them just popped up AS THEY LEFT THE GATES and sliced his throat open, then beheaded him, then tossed it to the stunned militia on the gates before they rode off. They then managed to pillage and murder all the local humanoids and brigands, so were on the run from literally EVERYONE I could think off. This all occurred in about three sessions. I called it quits after that and juts described gruesome deaths for each of them

I missed everything from AD&D to 5th so don't know how bad they were.  As so much in RPGs it depends on the DM & Players; we're very lucky in having a set of long standing friends non of whom are power gamers.

After 18 months of play we've got to 5th level; personally I think D&D is best between 5th and 9th level, lower than that party members can be killed by relatively low level incidents or unlikely dice combinations, higher than that the party becomes too powerful.

Also the DM is keeping magic in very short supply which helps prevent it dominating the campaign.

AD&D is the worst of them, IMO

3rd ed (and all the 3.XX off shoots) was good - real breath of fresh air, quite innovative and relatively open system but had glaringly horrible assumptions at the roots which eventually killed it (and was also buried under a ton of power creep in attempts to "balance" things. and sell more books.). 4th suffered from terrible marketing angles initially and never quite recovered, which is a shame as the actual system is very robust (especially as you can effectively ignore the "tactical wargame" aspect if you want and run a very open and fluid game), and there's some superb campaign support for it - WotC really hit their stride with Gardemoore and the revamped Keep on the Borderlands/Chaos Scar series.

But Fifth is a nice step sideways - it's got more of the "charm" of old school early RPGs whilst (thus far) appearing to have decent mechanics that don't tempt to fiddling about or inconsistency I do like a good low magic game as well, but that's VERY hard to do in AD&D/3.XX, as characters are essentially their equipment list for the most part

FK - Runequest was awesome, but it's twenty five years since I really played it, as no one I knew wanted to! So I missed all the Heroquest stuff etc. We might be starting a full on Orlanthi under the Lunars game soon though. Sadly by soon, that's likely a year away... if you enjoyed it, have you seen Prince of Sartar?

http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/introduction-chapter-1/

[Zippee]

I ran Rolemaster for several years - a mega campaign that finally saw the heroes slay their nemesis (it was all about an heirloom sword he'd nicked of a PC back in their early days) in front of his orc horde, deep under the Misty Mountains, as he was summoning a balrog - all very dramatic, unfortunately the dramatic, long leap and roll of 346 to kill the nemesis happened just that fraction of a round too late. The balrog had been summoned but not yet bound, oops major upset But really one of the most memorable scenes was the party larking around after a bit too much pipe weed, playing with casting light on moonlit lakes to see what happened as the water molecules drifted apart - or playing invisible snowball fights in the camp. It was an odd campaign

Loved Harn for the background - best stuff available in the 80s but the system was a non-starter, just too realistic, heroic fantasy needs a little bit of heroics. The background wasn't as gritty as the rules.

Never really fell for Runequest, probably because the local advocates were a little too vocal. And MERP/RM filled that D100 niche anyway without the bl**dy ducks!

I'm running Tyranny of Dragons now - well once we finish the SW and what not we'll get back to it. I ran it as a direct follow on to Phandelver, the green dragon and cult provide a nice link. One of the nice things we've found about 5ed is that mixing PC levels in the party isn't a game breaker. Two 5th level PCs connected the Phandelver group to the TOD group and by chapter 4 everyone's pretty much the same level without anything getting out of kilter. it's a very robust, sleek system.

Too many RPGs over too many years, and we haven't even touched on most of the systems, we had a great Traveller campaign with rotating GMs - the goal was really to leave the party on some kind of crisis cliff-hanger at the end of your session, the wackier the better. So the next GM had to come up with an explanation and a way out, great stuff

[Fenton]

If anyone wants the old MERP modules you can find them here

http://merp1.free.fr

And here

http://merp2.free.fr

[toxicpixie]

We played Rolemaster for nearly a decade and a half, I think, before we switched to D&D 3.XX which did what we'd bashed RM into but out the box, and a lot more simply... That said, my RM campaign world is s till going strong, now for another group in another era - this time about five hundred years prior to the first time it was run, and a thousand years before the furthest advanced period I ran I use it to dip in and out of "history" depending what I feel like - so it's been "classic" Medieval high fantasy, a bit of Arabian Knights (sic), some pseudo-Fall of Rome, Pirates (yaaaar!) and some "Monkey Magic meets Zero and Apaches"

If you & Peter keep on I'll have to ask for the 5e starter set for Xmas to plunder

[Zippee]

If you & Peter keep on I'll have to ask for the 5e starter set for Xmas to plunder

You could do far worse - you know like the usual stuff from last year: socks (dull but practical); a garden rake (interesting wrapping challenge though so credit for that), alcohol free whiskey (that one really sucked!) and an handy vacuum for the car (so basically an extra Sunday chore then).

It's small wonder I have to buy mystery Santa gifts for myself 

[Ithoriel]

I'm horrified to realise how many different game systems I've GM'd or played.

In roughly chronological order and allowing for the vagaries of memory - Empire of the Petal Throne, D&D, Dragonquest, Tunnels and Trolls, Powers & Perils, Heroquest, GURPS, Paranoia, Amber Diceless, Everway, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Star Wars, MERP, Rolemaster, Harnmaster, Firefly

I've probably forgotten several!

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Had several superb GURPS adventures at Sixth Form, never too powerful, always a challenge, with great players.

[toxicpixie]

You could do far worse - you know like the usual stuff from last year: socks (dull but practical); a garden rake (interesting wrapping challenge though so credit for that), alcohol free whiskey (that one really sucked!) and an handy vacuum for the car (so basically an extra Sunday chore then).

It's small wonder I have to buy mystery Santa gifts for myself 

Wow, that's great stuff! For Fathers Day Ms. Pixie got me a car clean, as she was fed up of the mess in my motor. Which I then had to pay for as she had no money when he arrived!

For Xmas we have a Snowman after dinner who brings presents. The traditional one has a hole in his bum they come out of, the one I made for us delivers them via c-section - who says Xmas isn't fun?! Last year he got me some Austrian Napoleonic generals and grenzer. He knows me well

[toxicpixie]

I'm horrified to realise how many different game systems I've GM'd or played.

In roughly chronological order and allowing for the vagaries of memory - Empire of the Petal Throne, D&D, Dragonquest, Tunnels and Trolls, Powers & Perils, Heroquest, GURPS, Paranoia, Amber Diceless, Everway, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Star Wars, MERP, Rolemaster, Harnmaster, Firefly

I've probably forgotten several!

My running & playing of games dropped off rather post house buying and then toddler wrangling, but yeah. It's a very silly list...

I always wanted to try GURPS, but no one I gamed with ever ran or even owned it (though I do have several interesting supplements, mainly Car Wars and alt-earth ones).

[Zippee]

I always wanted to try GURPS, but no one I gamed with ever ran or even owned it.

Yes, oddly it's the one I've never played. A great friend, always spoke highly of it and wanted to play it - so I have a copy, sadly he never volunteered to run a game, so it has languished on the shelf ever since.

These days we just seem to rotate through D&D and Cthulhu - now with added SW.

[toxicpixie]

There's a chap at the club runs it, but sadly the games he runs haven't appealed. Doubly so as it usually crosses with me running D&D At the club it's d20 D&D and d20 Star Wars, with a dash of Golden Heroes thrown in. I fancy running a bit of Traveller (old school Cepheus Engine, basically "LBB 1-3 with a couple of extra bits") next though, so I might put D&D on hiatus post current campaign arc.

And toy soldiers when I can actually inveigle people into it

[Ithoriel]

Ooh! Traveller! Said I'd probably forgotten some!

I preferred HeroQuest (the rpg not the boardgame) to GURPS though there are lots of similarities.