Friday, November 24, 2006

Another dumb poll

Well being a sucker for these I did another of these What Type of Roleplayer are you and got another set of results with a a similar set of scores for the different categories.

You scored as Combat Monster. The ringing of steel on steel is music to your ears. You must slate your thrist for blood. Hopefully there will be enough monsters to go around, or else you'll have to get inventive all over some NPC's faces.

Combat Monster

63%

Instigator

63%

Drama Queen

50%

Rules Lawyer

44%

Munchkin

44%

Comedian

44%

Do-gooder

44%

Goldbricker

38%

What type of RPG gamer are you?
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Thursday, November 23, 2006

So what kind of roleplayer am I

After trying an online poll posted by Charles Ryan I got the following result. Overall very close on lots of the categories which I think matches my feeling I don't have a dominant RPGing style.

You scored as Character Player. The Character Player enjoys creating in-depth characters with distinct and rich personalities. He identifies closely with his characters, feeling detached from the game if he doesnâ??t. He takes creative pride in exploring different characters, often making each new one radically different than others heâ??s played. The Character Player bases his decisions on his character's psychology first and foremost. He may view rules as a necessary evil at best, preferring sessions in which the dice never come out of their bags. For the Character Player, the greatest reward comes from experiencing the game from the emotional perspective of an interesting character.

Character Player

75%

Weekend Warrior

55%

Casual Gamer

55%

Storyteller

50%

Power Gamer

45%

Tactician

40%

Specialist

20%

What RPG Player (Not Character) Type Are You?
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Traveller

Traveller
This game was one I played for a number of years, starting with it in around 1978 or so. The lack of classes and move to career based characters with minimal development once chargen was completed was an eye opener after D&D's class and level approach. The big frustration with Traveller was always the chance of characters getting killed in chargen with there always being a tradeoff between the chance of death and the skills gained.

Traveller soon picked up plenty of supplements many of which we bought and I remember ]Mercenary, Striker and Azhanti High Lightning. With Striker I remember spending endles amounts of time crunching numbers for modern AFVs for it, but rarely playing it.

Like most games in the '70s and early '80s there was a lot of support in the gaming magazines in the UK, with White Dwarf having useful stuff before it was a pure GW housemag. I particularly remember the Sable Rose Affair scenario as one that we played from WD.

In the end I drifted away from Traveller for a number of reasons including the fact that I had less time for RPG after having started work and the lack of in game advancement for characters was unappealing compared to D&D or BRP mechanics.

Friday, November 03, 2006

My five most important RPG

I've been thinking about which of the many RPG that I've played or read have been the most important to my gaming. Of course these may have been hugely different for other people. In the end I've boiled it down to these few:

    Dungeons and Dragons
    Traveller
    RuneQuestII
    Paranoia
    The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen



Dungeons & Dragons
The granddaddy of them all, the first commercially published RPG. Personally I started in 1977 a little bit before the real boom in D&D in the early '80s. My introduction to the game was with the Original Game in the White Box with the three booklets of Men and Magic, Monsters & Treasure and Wilderness Adventures. Initially we didn't have the polyhedral dice so everything including to-hit rolls and saves were done using D6. For combat that will have had an impact as the probability curves will have been very different for a number of dice than a single D20.

I started initially playing with my older brother GMing, at first it was just me as a player with a number of characters at once including Theo the elf, Acquila the fighter and Eskel the Cleric. We soon started playing with some of my brother's school friends and I get very hazy now on characters partly as many were very short lived.

Funnily enough despite being a miniatures gamer before I played D&D, using Airfix and Matchbox 20mm and 54mm plastic figures to play games I never really used minis with D&D that much until 3e.

When I came back to RPGing in 2003 after a number of years of very infrequent RP gaming, with that little I did being Call of Cthulhu, I restarted with D&D, but this time 3e. This was at GenCon Europe in Easter 2003 playing throught the Wizard's Amulet and Crucible of Freya from Necromancer Games. From there I've been playing D&D pretty regularly going over to 3.5 to run a campaign in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and playing in a campaign in another GM's homebrewed setting.

The Acaeum is a really useful resource for finding out about the many D&D products over the years and also useful to see what a book on ebay might be worth.

I'll talk about the other games in subsequent posts
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