RPGaDAY2015 Day 19: Favourite Supers RPG

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 19.

Favourite Supers RPG: I really wish I could say Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, but I haven’t played or ran it nearly enough to make that claim.

It’s going to have to be Mutants & Masterminds. I had a real blast with M&M back in my True20 days. We had a pretty cool campaign that was based on Planetary but became more like the Authority by way of Nextwave Agents of Hate. It didn’t matter because the system was fun and worked great, keeping the powers in the forefront but very streamlined mechanically.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 18: Favourite SF RPG

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 18.

Favourite SF RPG: Is almost impossible for me. I have very rarely played SF RPGs. I guess the most recent one was an SG-1 game when I was living in Halifax back in 2004. Supers is its own category, so I am really and truly stuck.

Can I say Fate Accelerated because we had a great Firefly game using those rules?

Can I say Old School Hack because Kirin Robinson – its creator – ran a kind of Star Frontiers hack using that at Gen Con in 2013?

Can I say the unnamed game I cooked up in university for our long running space opera campaign?

You’re going to have to accept one of those. I don’t have that much experience.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 17: Favourite Fantasy RPG

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 17.

Favourite Fantasy RPG: This should be an easy answer, but it’s kind of not. One of the reasons I design games is because I am unsatisfied with the games available. Further, what kind of fantasy? Swords & Sorcery? High fantasy? Science fantasy?

I’m going to go with Old School Hack. It’s got that D&D vibe, but it’s a super simple system that has always delivered really fun games in my experience. It’s generally delivers over-the-top games with crazy action, and is abstract enough that it can pretty much do everything from low fantasy to science fantasy.

D&D 5E gets the nostalgia vote – the majority of my gaming time has been spent with D&D, and I like 5E the best of any of its versions. D&D 5E is also a fun game. I enjoy it. The problem is the amount of prep time it takes. Still, for the D&D experience, 5E is my favourite taste.

Honourable mention goes to Jaws of the Six Serpents. This is as close to an off-the-shelf sword & sorcery game as any I’ve played. It was the inspiration for Sword Noir.

And back in the day, I really enjoyed True20 for fantasy. It’s the best complex (or semi-complex) RPG out there, and I had a lot of fun running my historical/fantasy Viking campaign with it.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 16: Longest Game Session

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 16.

Longest game session played: In grade school and early in high school, especially during summer, we used to have these days-long sessions, interspersed with watching movies or even players doing something else while the GM planned further once the adventure had reached as far as he had written. I can’t really quantify how long some of those sessions ran.

In university, though, I know we had plenty of all-nighters, and one in particular sticks out. Right before my Russian history midterm in third year, we had a game that ran eleven hours. I did really poorly on that test. Luckily, the prof allowed me to make it up, because I was doing really well in the course otherwise.

I don’t know if I could survive an eleven hour play session these days. Might be interesting to try.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 15

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 15.

Longest Campaign Played? I’m definitely going to have to reach back for this. Back in high school I was a GM in a collective Middle Earth campaign that used a lot of ICE Middle Earth products but ran them with D&D. This must have gone on for three or four years. That probably doesn’t sound long to a lot of those people who have decade long campaigns, but for someone who generally doesn’t go longer than a year for a campaign, that was pretty long. We also had two or more sessions a week, and those were long sessions, so both just in amount of time in campaign and calendar length, this must be my longest.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 14

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 14.

Favourite RPG Accessory? You mean besides dice?

I guess this means supplement? Seems to be, as there is not “supplement” on the list. Looking at my bookshelf, I don’t have a lot of supplements. I’m tempted to say my Acer Iconia tablet, as this is a peripheral I use a lot for my gaming, but that doesn’t seem fair.

I’d have to go with the Ultramodern Firearms, the d20 version written by Charles Ryan and published by Green Ronin. Back in the day, I ran d20 Modern campaigns and Ultramodern Firearms provided lots of great support for cool weapons carried by the spec ops PCs and their unsavoury opposition.

Wow, that was reaching back.

You can get a copy of Ultramodern Firearms pretty cheap at Paizo.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 13

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 13.

Favourite RPG Podcast? You mean other than the Accidental Survivors?

I’d have to go with Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. It’s one of the few RPG podcasts to which I still listen regularly. Other podcasts I’ll generally listen if the topic interests me, but for K&R, I just download the latest and give it a listen. It’s generally high quality discussions of interesting topics.

Though I still like the Accidental Survivors better (wink, wink/nudge, nudge).

RPGaDAY2015 Day 12

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 12.

Favourite RPG Illustration. Favourite RPG Illustration? Wow. He’s not making this easy.

I am going to cheat here. Deal with it. My absolute favourite RPG illustration right now comes from one of my own books. It’s a picture Kieron O’Gorman did for Nefertiti Overdrive.

Tell me that’s not awesome. Actually, don’t do that, because then I would be legally required to smack you in the mouth . . virtually, as in over the intarwebs, and since I don’t know how to do that, don’t make me.

This awesome piece of action artwork is kind of in a tie with two other pieces created for other games – one by Ed Northcott and another by Kieron O’Gorman.

Ed did some pics of my adaptation of an iconic fantasy pair which appeared in Sword Noir.

Kieron did fantastic work for Centurion, and this is my favourite from that.

Yeah, I guess otherwise, if I had to choose something from outside my own games I’d have to go with the first cover to the AD&D PHB. Not so much because it is something I think is particularly evocative on its own, but because it has become so iconic.

RPGaDAY2015 Day 11

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 11.

Favourite RPG Writer: Are you shitting me? Wow. This one is super difficult. I mean, there are RPG writers I like and whose name will mean that I will definitely give something a look, but I really don’t think I have a “favourite.” I’m looking at my bookshelf of RPGs and nothing jumps out and kicks me in the face.

I guess I have to go with E. Gary Gygax. Listen, he’s not the best writer, not the best designer, and maybe somebody else would have done it if he hadn’t. He wasn’t the sole creator of D&D, but he represents the creation of D&D. He’s more an icon than a writer. I appreciate him in the way I appreciate George Lucas – sure he could hang himself given enough rope, but look what he brought into the world. Look at it!

RPGaDAY2015 Day 10

#RPGaDAY2015 is the brainchild of game designer Dave Chapman. Basically, each day in August there is a question about RPGs. This is day 10.

Favourite RPG Publisher: Does Kickstarter count? I’m really having problems with this one. I don’t really follow a publisher, but there are a lot of amazing publishers putting out sweet, sweet RPGs. Picking one doesn’t seem fair (especially since it would be false). I might have to go with Magpie Games since they fulfill my Kickstarters and have recently published Urban Shadows and will be publishing Cartel, two games that showed up in my RPGaDAY2015 catchup.

Let’s go with that.