What RPG/System/Setting did you avoid, but after trying it out found you *really* liked - and why?

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tenbones

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For me - Savage Worlds. It's been a shocking few years that after 30-seconds into my first game session (Deadlands Reloaded) that after dodging this system and ALL of its settings... that I fell so hard for it. While I'm not going to say it's perfect (it isn't), it certainly is a pound-for-pound contender for being my go-to system of choice for gaming.

Reasons: flexibility, easy rules, scalability.

Setting: Warhammer - for *decades* I've avoided Wahammer. For no reason other than I felt I missed the boat on it from its inception. Now? I love the setting. I have yet to start running it, but I'm engrossed with reading up on its lore which is hella-deep.

Reasons: Vermintide II forced me to love Warhammer.
 
When I first checked out The Fantasy Trip I found it too minis-heavy with lots of fiddly facing rules.

Realized at some point that I had read the 'advanced' rules and went back and read Melee and Wizard and realized the base rules were quite simple and stream-lined with deadly combat and some cool features in the magic system.
 
Well, not really tried it, but I definitely grew to feel I massively missed out.

I got introduced to the Hero system twice in the 80s.

One time was by a friend of the time. He had some edition of Champions and wanted me to try it. So, I wanted a pretty standard blaster character. I wanted a character who could shoot energy blasts, fly, and had a personal protective screen. Pretty basic stuff.

Well, my friend refused to let me look at the rulebook. He insisted on doing all the creation and math himself. So three hours of me reading Dragon Magazine and comics later, he had a character for me to play. He set up a scenario where a bank was being robbed and I was witness to it. I said I switch my blast to a wide angle beam like in Return of the Archons in Star Trek and zap the bank robbers. This was because he had explained profusely that my blast did STUN damage, not killing damage.

Well, then my friend had to calculate the damage and endurance cost for doing a wide angle beam. He pulled out a calculator, and I heard him talking about cosines and shit. I eventually went back to reading his Dragon magazines and comics.

About an hour later he declared that I had done enough damage to drop the bank robbers. So, I turned them over to police. Since I had been at his house all day, it was time to go home. Thus ended my first Champions game. t

He never asked me to roll dice, nor did he ever do so. It was mostly just him fiddling with a calculator or doing math.

Looking back, I can recognize that whatever he was doing, it had no relation to the Hero system. But I didn't know that at the time. And bear in mind that this was my POSITIVE introduction to the Hero system. The negative one is next.

Same friend. This time we're at the game shop that existed locally in the 80s. My friend had met a couple of guys who he thought were mega cool and they played Hero. They went on and on about how awesome their campaign was and how many characters they had created. They bitched and moaned about how they had created a villain named Apocalypse and Marvel had stolen their idea. Anyway, they were going to introduce us to Hero system.

Once again, making characters was too complicated for feeble mortals such as myself, so I had to describe what I wanted and they'd stat it up for me. This time I wanted to play a cat-man with super reflexes and a blaster. Oh, and he needed a starfighter too. Nowadays, this would seem like I was wanting a taller, cat-man version of Rocket Racoon. Back then it just seemed off the wall. To their credit, they made the character, and did so in much less time than my friend had taken to make my earlier blaster.

Characters made, we found ourselves in a hero/villain bar. It seems that when heroes weren't out stopping supercriminals, and the supercriminals weren't out destroying the world, they all hung out in a bar. We were introduced to a guy named Lone Star, who was effectively Michael Knight from Knight Rider, the campaign world's Captain America equivalent, and one of the hugest GMPCs I've ever encountered in all my years of gaming (beating even my own GMPCs at GMPCness easily). We got to hear for what seemed like years about how awesome Lone Star and his "Kitt Car" were.

I don't recall what happened. We pissed someone in the bar off somehow. Maybe we questioned their total world dominating awesomeness or something. That meant we had to have a battle of honor. We were all teleported to an arena (basically a football stadium), and we were supposed to fight some supervillains.

What resulted was a clustermess. I remember they used an action chart, but not the action chart from the Hero game. We rolled 1d20 roll high for attack. Damage used multiple polyhedrals. If their system had ever been Hero System, it wasn't recognizable as that any longer. The combat lasted half a round. It took two hours to resolve. All our characters were beaten up by their awesome NPCs.

I wanted to go home, but my friend (my ride) thought these guys were absolutely brilliant. We went to Whataburger where he and they literally talked about their campaign all night long. He finally dropped me off at home sometime in the wee hours of the morning.

So yeah, I never wanted to see Hero system again.

Steve Long is why I decided to give Hero a chance. I was on some Star Trek RPG forums back in the Last Unicorn Games Star Trek days. Steve Long would pop by there and seemed a pretty decent dude. I never directly interacted with him, but he seemed pretty cool. He very rarely talked about Hero System, and the things he referred to in it surprisingly had absolutely no relation to the things I had been exposed to in the 80s. When he relaunched Hero System, I was buying everything else, so I decided to pick up Hero 5 and give it a chance.

I'm absolutely certain now that if I had been properly introduced to Hero system back in the 80s or 90s, instead of that shit my friend and those two imbeciles introduced me to, then I would have fully embraced the system. I would have skipped the whole Palladium period of my life and indulged in the kind of math bliss that only Hero could provide. I so wish I had been exposed to it when I was younger. It would easily have become my primary game, if not my ONLY game.

Now I feel like I'm too old to properly absorb it. I keep trying, but I just don't have the drive to dive into systems like I used to. Maybe soon I'll get myself really going with it. That's what I hope anyway.
 
PbtA. It just sounded odd and I couldn't wrap my brain around it. But after playing the Spawl, I was hooked. With my gaming groups these days, I really need simply rules that help quick start a game. Apocalypse World and Dungeon World were both great.
 
Now I need to re-crack my Hero System books and look at it.
 
Now I feel like I'm too old to properly absorb it. I keep trying, but I just don't have the drive to dive into systems like I used to. Maybe soon I'll get myself really going with it. That's what I hope anyway.

I can help with questions with 5th edition Hero System or earlier. Still my goto system for superhero campaigns.
 
As for the OP, the most recent example is Cublicle's take on the Middle Earth setting. I still don't care for The One Ring however after I got Adventures in Middle Earth, I looked at their TOR supplements and adventures and found them to be best support material for Middle Earth campaign I ever read.
 
Powered by the Apocalypse

All I heard about was.how edgy and adult Apocalypse World was trying to be, and I wanted no part of that.

So I tried Dungeon World when a friend offered to run it later, and it was okay. I wasn't amazed, but I got the principle. Still to me D&D was the lens through which I experience fantasy, and DW wasn't my jam.

Then I played Masks when I heard good things about it on the Whelmed podcast. I was intrigued after playing a session. So I ran it and everything just clicked.
 
TSR's Marvel Super Heroes. I got the yellow box "Basic Revised" back when it was new, read the rules but was impressed. It's stayed in my collection for decades before I actually gave it a shot. Turns out it's a really good game with deepths that were not weren't apparent at first glance.
 
For me it was BRP about 4 or 5 years ago after decades of D&D/D20 gaming. I was always skeptical of the no-levels thing, and static Hit Points, and it seemed like would be very "blah." Once I actually picked up RuneQuest 6 (now Mythras) in a Bundle of Holding on a lark and really dug into the system and the adventures that came with it (Monster Island and Book of Quests) I started to grok what all the fuss was about.

The biggest selling point for me was that it seemed to be particularly well adapted to gritty settings (no surprise that resonated, since my favorite parts of D&D were always levels 1-4 ish), where even the mightiest warrior can be overcome by numbers, and even the lowliest zero has a shot of incapacitating a more skilled foe with a bit of luck or very careful planning or superior tactics. Granted, I tend to gravitate towards lighter versions of BRP (like Stormbringer/Magic World), but the fundamentals are still basically the same, and it's nice that most everything boils down to an easy-to-understand core mechanic -- You have an X% chance, and if you are opposed, the highest level of success wins.
 
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Man either you play a LOT of games (and I personally own a massive amount) - or you're more jaded than me. LOL
 
Man either you play a LOT of games (and I personally own a massive amount) - or you're more jaded than me. LOL
I'd presume that was aimed at Dumarest Dumarest


For me? Savage Worlds. I didn't get why people liked it. Then I read the Survival Manual. I liked it and tried it in a one-shot.
Then they changed the Shaken status and I put it on hold, of course...but that's how Savage Worlds surprised me positively.

BRP was also a nice surprise. At the time, I was playing GURPS and BRP seemed way too simplistic.
Then I tried it, and lo and behold, it seemed a lot like GURPS, except way simpler!
 
I'd presume that was aimed at Dumarest Dumarest


For me? Savage Worlds. I didn't get why people liked it. Then I read the Survival Manual. I liked it and tried it in a one-shot.
Then they changed the Shaken status and I put it on hold, of course...but that's how Savage Worlds surprised me positively.

BRP was also a nice surprise. At the time, I was playing GURPS and BRP seemed way too simplistic.
Then I tried it, and lo and behold, it seemed a lot like GURPS, except way simpler!
I had the opposite experience. I was playing Call of Cthulhu a lot when I met GURPS. I thought GURPS was too complicated, too many rules. Then I played it and loved it. To the point where nearly 30 years later, GURPS 3rd ed is still my all time favourite RPG.
 
Man either you play a LOT of games (and I personally own a massive amount) - or you're more jaded than me. LOL
Dumarest doesn't sleep. Dumarest once spent three days and three nights fighting a bear over a salmon. He won. Then he gave the bear the fish. Dumarest ate a 1998 Toyota over the course of six months because someone bet him it couldn't be done. An idol of Dumarest with a three-foot wang made of polished jade was found in a temple built by an Amazonian tribe that hadn't been contacted since 1902. He once translated the Voynich Manuscript into an even more obscure language of his own devising.

You say jaded. But could it be that he's simply more experienced than any ordinary mortal man?

Dear me, I am in a silly mood this morning... :wink:
 
Dungeons & Dragons 3/3.5.

I disliked almost everything about it when I read the Player's Handbook. The layout sucked, the art irritated me, the long-winded writing style and complexity all had a hand in putting me off the game.

I played it and found it okay, but saw no reason to buy it myself.

Then the Slaine d20 game came out and I desperately wanted to referee that. So I waded into the books again. I still didn't like them, but I could use them. The campaign was fun, but I was still unconvinced with the system.

Later in 3.5 Edition's life, the Hypertext d20 SRD came along. A tidy, uncluttered, hyperlinked collection of rules, spells and monsters. I loved it! Psionics, epic levels and most of Unearthed Arcana's variant rules were added. I loved it even more.

I have used that website for numerous campaigns since and can't recommend it enough.

Meanwhile, the core books sit on my shelf gathering dust and crying.
 
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Dumarest doesn't sleep. Dumarest once spent three days and three nights fighting a bear over a salmon. He won. Then he gave the bear the fish. Dumarest ate a 1998 Toyota over the course of six months because someone bet him it couldn't be done. An idol of Dumarest with a three-foot wang made of polished jade was found in a temple built by an Amazonian tribe that hadn't been contacted since 1902. He once translated the Voynich Manuscript into an even more obscure language of his own devising.

You say jaded. But could it be that he's simply more experienced than any ordinary mortal man?

Dear me, I am in a silly mood this morning... :wink:
I do love a good reskinned Chuck Norris joke.

Is it true that Dumarest Dumarest once uppercutted a horse, leading to him inventing the giraffe?
 
FFG Star Wars. I really loved SAGA edition and hated the idea of the special dice. My brother bought the beginner's box so I was like "sure, I guess I'll give it a try since you are running it". Ended up loving the dice mechanics.
 
Actually it was Dungeons & Dragons. Back in the day we played Tunnels & Trolls, initially because we were schoolkids and it was a lot cheaper than buying all the AD&D 1e books, but also because of a sort-of weird snobbery. By which I mean I think we thought we were being cool by not playing the game that everyone else was playing. D&D was by far the most popular game and occupied a whole side of the local game shop. I always liked checking out all the stuff that was squeezed in together on the shelves on the other side of the shop :smile:

Anyway I eventually cracked and ended up buying the Mentzer red box when it came out. And, you know what, I reckon Dave and Gary were on to something :tongue:
 
Dungeons and Dragons. By the time I learned of it the games played by people I knew and the books they used with them seemed very Flindorfin the Elf: Quest to save the kingdom of Generos. Back in 2016 I started reading OSR stuff because it kept coming up online and then I learned about Weird Fantasy, Planetary Romance, Vance's Dying Earth, Moorcock, Burroughs and all the other stuff that fed into D&D and its cool settings like Dark Suns and Planescape and so on. Started playing and running it then.

Like others PbtA because I didn't quite get it. I still think the books can be a bit opaquely written, but "The Veil" turned me around. It has really good advice for running Cyberpunk in general, analysis of the genre and the rules had an interesting way of "building" Cyberpunk novels from a common skeleton. The major thing was seeing playing a story that isn't just the GM dictating his novella to you. With the people I play with I think there's always been a desire for doing something where their characters are more than the NPCs in some sense but not quite a novel, e.g. actually getting closure to personal stories, exploring a theme, etc. Not for everybody, but I really thought it suited the Cyberpunk genre. It felt like playing Blade Runner the film more so than running around in the world inspired by the film.
 
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I think a lot of the time it's the manner in which fans attempt to proseletyse others that is more offputting than the games themselves, but the systems/setting choices used can sometimes cause blocks. Looking over various systems:

GURPS - In the 1990s, I actually tried to avoid GURPS, to the effect that Phil Masters actually approached me in game conferance once to talk to me about it after interacting online, which made me feel quite self conscious! I was into World of Darkness games at the time, especially Mage, and GURPS always seemed too dry to me by contrast. It attempted a sort of authoritive, encyclopedia approach to it's writings, but the system also seemed a bit too mechanical. I swung in it's direction in the late 1990s/early 2000s while trying to find a workable science fiction system - and played Traveller and Transhuman Space. The only thing I found offputting, from that point was that there were overly long lists of traits to select from. Oh, and they should have used the metric system, if they wanted to be truly universal, rather than the Imperial system of measurement.

HERO - I still have issues, in all honestly, with it's system. In game terms, I think it would actually work better with roll high, but this might be something which is not an option at this stage of it's venerable life. It largely went under the radar for me as I wasn't really into Supers games in my youth, and I don't think it was as big or inflential a game in the UK (where i grew up) as it was in the USA. The main improvement I'd like to see would be in the core games presentation (Champions Complete is terribly plain and actually not that easy to read), but they could also do with reducing the number of traits, skills and so on in their lists (just like GURPS). It does have some very well written, and comprehensive sourcebooks though - I especially like Darren Watt's Golden Age Champions, which is the best supers book I have read for any RPG. And it uses Metric!

Savage Worlds - the system looks to be an odd mathematical construction on first glance. Using cards, randomly distributed, for Initiative seems very swingy while the 'Wild Die' makes the odds of success (even on a low D4 stat roll) really high. Then again, there are traits to give people advantage/disadvantage with Initiative and it's just a baseline assumption of the game to succeed more often than not and keep the game moving. The setting choices also seem to reflect this attitude in the main. Generally, it's not a game that tries to push intellectualism as some other games try to, but just 'fast, furious fun' as it says on the lid. And that is fine. The settings I like most are Flash Gordon (great acquisition for them), Streets of Bedlam (Sin City in effect) and Low Life (because I like weird games). Should use the metric system….

FATE - Put off, as I say, mainly by the aggressive proselytising, but also the specific type of dice - which wasn't readily available till they mass manufactured them. I was actually a lot more enthused by using the cards, which came out later - because of my previous experience with Everway and Castle Falkenstein (which I think were both very much antecedent 'narrative' games to what Fate was trying to do). What has largely sold me on FATE since is the tremendous support they offer with setting books, which are generally well done and interesting. Moreover, more than any other game on this list, I actually find it to be genuinely 'generic' in it's potential use. That is, unlike Savage Worlds that has a specific mode of play ingrained into the system, FATE carries no specific flavour of it's own and can be adapted for lots of games with particular tweaks. It's what GURPS also sets out to do, but without the baggage of massive trait lists. For me, Fate offers a lot of creative freedom, which is I guess, what the fans always saw in it.

Apocalypse World - The major weakness here is that the original game is actually one of the weakest entries in it's family. Games like Dungeon World and Monster of the Week present the rules more clearly and the archetypes used (which are critical to the game design) are better thought out. Honestly, I haven't found that many games that can't be done with other systems though - which is a problem for a lot of generic games. For example, there appears to be lots of cyberpunk settings unsing AW rules, but I'm happy just using Cyberpunk or Shadowrun for the most part, which means these new games are just more of the same to me. I do like the new Kult game, though, which has benefited a lot from having the AW rules applied to it - and they do run very smoothly in an easy to understand and logical way.
 
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Rolemaster, I always thought it was ridiculously complex. Eventually those Angus McBride covers sucked me in. I made one character, rolled my eyes, sold the books to the second hand shop, spent two weeks thinking about it, went back to re-purchase them, discovered they'd sold, bought them new again. Ran it heavily for ten years.
 
Vampire the masquerade.

I honestly thought the idea of playing Vampires was a bit cheesy. How wrong I was! Probably the best gsmes I've ever played (and run). Although, we pretty much always played all Sabbat Vampires.
Actually back in 1991/1992, before I read the book and played it, I couldn't concieve of how they could actually design a whole game around a premise that I thought was way too narrow and awkward to get going. I was wrong about that.
 
Dungeons & Dragons for me, kind of... I'd played it a bit in high school and college... never took to it... started to really dislike it... thought Gygax was an asshole... jumped ship first chance I got (discovered Runequest).
Years later I came upon the OSR stuff, and B/X... and I'm surprised at how much fun I've had with it after being such a prig.
I'm still not sure if I'm going to warm up to 5e... ain't looking good so far.

Vampire/WOD is one that I never touched back in the day, primarily because of the folks playing it.
I've still never played it, but I've read it and it's high on my list of games I'd really like to try... given the right group (which goes for most any RPG).
 
It's probably my favorite game and I do go on about it, but I was initially turned-off by Dungeon Crawl Classics. I was very anti-table, and I'm still very reluctant to play a game that requires referencing tables during play. And the spells! Each spell description took up an entire page, and the effects were so random. It just seemed to cumbersome and clunky. I can't remember exactly what changed my mind - I think it was reading a bunch of really stellar reviews of the adventures and core system that caused me to take a closer look. Something sparked, I ran a funnel, and the rest was inevitable.
 
"What RPG/System/Setting did you avoid, but after trying it out found you *really* liked - and why?"

None. I have only *really* liked two RPGs (TFT and GURPS), and I hadn't been avoiding them. And there have been no RPG settings that I avoided but then really liked.

I have a pretty long list of RPGs I've made some effort to enjoy, and failed. And a shorter list of games I think are OK, but have problems with.

At most there are some RPGs that I wasn't really interested in, then eventually tried or looked at, and liked better than I had feared. The closest example is probably The James Bond RPG, which I assumed for many years was probably something I'd be severely unhappy with. Eventually I learned more (thanks too to Dumarest's thread here) and found it had some good points (though I'd probably replace many/most of the rules mechanics with GURPS if I ran it).

(There are a few other games (wargames, board games, computer games) that I avoided or thought would be bad that I enjoyed after I tried them, but not RPGs.)
 
Skarg is like my mirror version. I like so many games. So so many. GURPS is not one of them :tongue:

But you know, that is what I like about the RPG hobby, there are games for everyone.
 
Now I feel like I'm too old to properly absorb it. I keep trying, but I just don't have the drive to dive into systems like I used to. Maybe soon I'll get myself really going with it. That's what I hope anyway.
Those stories are hilarious!

Never to late to start Hero. What really changed it for me was Hero Designer, which is a computer program for character creation. It's fun building characters, and you learn about the game as to build them.

 
Man either you play a LOT of games (and I personally own a massive amount) - or you're more jaded than me. LOL
Dumarest doesn't sleep. Dumarest once spent three days and three nights fighting a bear over a salmon. He won. Then he gave the bear the fish. Dumarest ate a 1998 Toyota over the course of six months because someone bet him it couldn't be done. An idol of Dumarest with a three-foot wang made of polished jade was found in a temple built by an Amazonian tribe that hadn't been contacted since 1902. He once translated the Voynich Manuscript into an even more obscure language of his own devising.

You say jaded. But could it be that he's simply more experienced than any ordinary mortal man?

Dear me, I am in a silly mood this morning... :wink:

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Belive it or not, I wasn't interested in Hârn when first introduced to it. I've been a moderator on the Hârn forum since 2005 or so. You could say I changed my mind.

I was initially skeptical of FFG Star Wars, being a big fan of the WEG system, but from the first session it blew my mind. Great stuff.

Shadow of the Demon Lord didn't Interest me either, but it got good reviews so I got a copy to read on vacation. Now it's one of my favourite games to run.

As an inversion to this thread, I really really wanted to grok the Hero system. 5e looked so cool, and the sourcebooks... wow. But I couldn't get the gist of it so I never got far into it. Now, I get it mostly, thanks to Sidekick. However, I think I'm going to use 4e for the most part. 4e Fantasy Hero is apparently really good. Just ordered a copy of the 4e system book too.
 
I'm going to have to says GURPS, also. I was absolutely horrified at my first look at it. I thought it was the absolute height of the anal-retentive RPG-geek tendency to insist on having rules for EVERYTHING!!! and try to make them painstakingly realistic.

Still, eventually I somehow ended up running GURPS Bunnies & Burrows and had to actually understand the system, and... it's pretty good, actually. It really does feel oddly realistic. And it's surprisingly simple to use once you've got the hang of it.

Mind you, I keep meaning to use it for something else, but every time I try to adapt it to something I end up overwhelmed and give up, so I guess I'm not entirely over my first impression. :tongue: Still, I can recognise its strengths.
 
I'll try any game once, even Cortex.
Same. I've yet to be surprised by any, but I've enjoyed most of them. I didn't care for Cortex, FATE, 2D20 and their derivatives, but I am willing to try them all, at least once. Twice if I like them.
 
I had the opposite experience. I was playing Call of Cthulhu a lot when I met GURPS. I thought GURPS was too complicated, too many rules. Then I played it and loved it. To the point where nearly 30 years later, GURPS 3rd ed is still my all time favourite RPG.
Nothing wrong with that, man. I suspect it was the crew and the settings* more than the system that influenced my attitude...and I'd definitely play GURPS again if my wife decides to refresh one of her campaigns:grin:!
But overall, I somehow got used to d100, and slightly less precision than GURPS, compensated for by more speed** at the table.

*XV century CoC and Glorantha. Alas, most of the crew remained behind on TBP!
**Purely in my experience - though GURPS was also moving plenty quickly.

I do love a good reskinned Chuck Norris joke.

Is it true that Dumarest Dumarest once uppercutted a horse, leading to him inventing the giraffe?
Of course it is:tongue:!


Dungeons and Dragons. By the time I learned of it the games people I knew played and the books they used with them seemed very Flindorfin the Elf: Quest to save the kingdom of Generos. Back in 2016 I started reading OSR stuff because it kept coming up online and then I learned about Weird Fantasy, Planetary Romance, Vance's Dying Earth, Moorcock, Burroughs and all the other stuff that fed into D&D and its cool settings like Dark Suns and Planescape and so on. Started playing and running it then.
Sounds almost exactly with my story with D&D...
Except I took the OSR playstyle advice and applied it to other games with mechanics me and my group like better:shade:.
 
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FFG Star Wars. I really loved SAGA edition and hated the idea of the special dice. My brother bought the beginner's box so I was like "sure, I guess I'll give it a try since you are running it". Ended up loving the dice mechanics.
Gonna say a similar thing about FFG Star Wars
 
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