Favorite RPG

I sometimes wonder what my favorite role-playing game is. It's sort of like wondering what my favorite meat dish is - the answer doesn't matter, and it's never the same answer twice in a row. But it's an amusing and harmless way to spend an evening when you don't feel good enough to do anything, but not quite bad enough to justify going to bed early.

The game I played the most was without a doubt Dungeons & Dragons. I started playing it back around 1977 or so, when the game consisted of three flimsy tan booklets and the Greyhawk and Blackmoor business (remember them?). Though there were things about D&D that I heartily disliked, it was still fun to play, to the point that it was almost impossible to talk my hearties into playing any other RPG.

Is it just me, or the backwards armor class drive anyone else crazy too? How much sense does it make that armor class -3 is better than armor class +17? And the profusion of dice bugged me - woe betide the player who lost his 12-sided dice, or who stepped on that ridiculous 4-sided dice in the middle of the night while scrounging around for uneaten Fiddle Faddle in the dark.

But I played a lot of D&D. I knew people who were quite monogamous with D&D. They played only D&D, and they bought only D&D. But I was considerably more promiscuous. I could even be called an RPG slut, because I could never survive the temptation of a new RPG on the shelves at the game stores I haunted. I bought Tunnels & Trolls, Bushido, Chivalry & Sorcery, Arduin, three versions of Traveller, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, The Fantasy Trip, Dragonquest, Star Trek, Universe, The Morrow Project, Shadowrun, D&D, Twilight 2000, Boot Hill... I bought games that were only loosely role-playing, like Deathmaze, Citadel of Blood, Car Wars, and Gunslinger. For crying out loud, I even played Squad Leader/Cross of Iron as though it were a role-playing game, and managed to convince myself that when I played NATO Division Commander, I was indeed the Division Commander in question. (One of the few major gaps in my RPG collection in those days was a lack of Runequest. I don't know anything about Runequest as a game or a system, but I eventually got kind of tired of those elite RQ people constantly harping about how Runequest was the "thinking man's RPG" as opposed to the schlocky crap that was D&D. I don't normally spend much of my time defending D&D, but gee whiz, guys, give it a rest already.)

I didn't play most of them. At least not with other people. The only ones I played with other people were a lot of D&D, a little bit of Traveller, and a dab of Boot Hill. But I spent unholy amounts of time on Twilight 2000, Traveller, and Boot Hill, and maintained very long campaigns in all three played solitaire. And how sad is that? Who ever heard of playing an RPG solitaire? It's like playing poker solitaire! It's unseemly and kind of disturbing. Traveller in particular soaked up an awful lot of my time back in those days. I still have all my Traveller notes in a plastic bin - more subsector maps than Carter had pills, hundreds of characters (including several that I strongly believe were lifted more or less intact from the game Freedom In The Galaxy, including Sidir Ganang). I wrote several very substantial programs on my Commodore 64 to automate the character generation systems in High Guard and Mercenary, and to design starships using the "little black book" rules.

So if "favorite RPG" means the one I played the most, it's D&D. If it means the one I spent the most time on, it's Traveller. If it means the one that I found most amusing to tinker with, it's Boot Hill.

I never designed a world in D&D - I was content to merely play, and never really did any of the creative work. But I did design several new subsectors in Traveller, and created a whole fictional part of Arizona in Boot Hill (I note with some amusement that many of the planets in my Traveller subsectors had names drawn from Gordon Dickson's "Three to Dorsai" set, courtesy of the Science Fiction Book Club, and many of my Boot Hill characters had "X-eye" names, like Deadeye, Pig's Eye, Eagle Eye, and, sadly, someone named "Numbnuts").

I also spent a lot of time on Twilight 2000, but I developed a love-hate relationship with that game. I loved aspects of it, such as the two-card draw to determine NPC personalities, a system I freely adapted to Boot Hill and even Traveller, but the game itself wasn't terribly rewarding to play. Firefights took so long to resolve (especially if they involved more than a handful of characters) that I ended up writing a computer program (in Pascal, aieee) based on Dupuy's Quantified Judgment Model to resolve them. Of course, the QJM is highly statistical and generates bizarre results when there are only 11 people in the fight ("What do you mean, an advance rate of 177 kilometers per day??"), but at least it allowed me to resolve the fights between the "good guys" and the "evil Spetsnaz colonel's army" in less than six calendar months.

Eventually my RPG pilot light went out and I stopped fiddling with them. One milepost on the highway to ruin was the release of Traveller: The New Era, which I heartily disliked. Another milepost was the realization that D&D, by now AD&D or ADHD&D or whatever it was, had become less a game than a lifestyle choice (in the same way that Advanced Squad Leader or full-house Starfleet Battles could only be grokked if you lived them to the exclusion of everything else for about eight months). And RPGs started coming out faster than I could buy them, let alone learn them, and indeed Shadowrun was the last one I ever bought (and, perhaps not coincidentally, I found it entirely unworkable).

This is not to say that I have no interest in RPGs. I still tinker with a new set of Boot Hill rules from time to time, and I occasionally find myself flipping through Universe and thinking "This actually seems pretty interesting." (Not to digress too far, but one of the things I liked about Universe was that it took place in roughly the 23rd century, in a tiny part of the galaxy. This was in direct contrast to Traveller, which was in the 35th century and spanned pretty much the whole galaxy. I could wrap my mind around the society that existed in Universe, but Traveller was sometimes hard to visualize. What's a trip to a Tech Level 15 convenience store like? In the 35th century, what are money, infotainment, sex, and restaurants like? Beats me!)

Will I ever play an RPG again? I can't say I never will. But if I do, you can probably bet it'll be either Universe, Boot Hill, or some vintage variant of D&D.