If the laws of the Internet were to be obeyed this should be a Top 5 list. That was the original intent of the blog but I finally gave up trying to find five and went with the more honest four. The problem is so many of my TTRPG influences are games I’ve read and not actually run. These are the games that have influenced me significantly because I’ve actually run them.
They also span the start of my GM ‘career’ right up to the current game I am running at the time of writing.
Golden Heroes
After being introduced to TTRPG’s by a friend I decided to buy some games when my birthday came around. I purchased Traveller, Middle-Earth Role-Playing and Golden Heroes. I dabbled in the first two once, but Golden Heroes stood the distance despite not having read a vast amount of comics.
Golden Heroes wasn’t the first game I ran, that goes to a game called Maelstrom that came in paperback novel format and got called not a proper role-playing game by everyone I knew at the time.
Yes, it’s a not a proper X or version of X goes back a long way.
I ran one session of Maelstrong because the player took the piss. I ran Golden Heroes next and the same player took the piss. When I think about it now he was one of those annoying sorts who expected everyone to be serious in his games but when he was a player he was chaos personified. He was the destroyer of anything but gonzo stupidity.
Anyway, groups changed and Golden Heroes became the source of my first campaign.
I’m not convinced Golden Heroes system was influential at a system level, for me. It had some interesting ideas on ‘campaign ratings’ for superheroes with such things like popularity scores, but overall the system was pretty messy like a lot of systems of the time. You even had to do division in actual play to represent armour and force fields, which is pretty crazy. There is no way that is a good idea.
While the system may not have been that influential for me the superhero genre was. It meant that my formative years running games were unimpeded by the staples of Dungeons and Dragons: levels, exhaustive equipment lists, classes, encumbrance, the game as a series of challenges to be overcome. Instead, I was trying to simulate comic books even though I’d read a whole lot of them.
What Golden Heroes did was establish my ‘running games apprenticeship’ as being very different from the staple Dungeons & Dragons experience many people had.
West End Games Star Wars
The West End Games Star Wars game spoke to me directly. It spoke to me directly because it was Star Wars but the true reason it spoke to me was the emulation of the Star Wars source material both in terms of its simple, fast-paced rules and how it talked about running game in the rulebook.
You see my formative experiences as a player was with the FASA Star Trek game. We used it to construct our campaigns like TV shows with theme tunes, seasons and episode lists. We had seasonal arcs, character-focused episodes and everything. It was pretty awesome but I’m also sure the system wasn’t one that helped us along, it just sort of existed.
The WEG Star Wars game was like an almost perfect merger of source material and system. As a product, it was akin to an adrenaline shot. The first edition especially, before it was burdened with all sorts of additional rules to simulate, not emulate, a load of stuff that wasn’t really necessary in the space opera genre.
It was inspiring to see a system actually advise you on how to emulate the fast-paced, action-orientated genre of space opera at the gaming table. The concept of mixing role-playing into the action rather than it being separated, starting things in medias res in the middle of the action, following philosophies along the lines of why blow up a city when you can blow up a planet and ensuring your locations were epic, big in scale and gorgeous. The Star Wars films influenced my gamin significantly and the WEG Star Wars role-playing game is part of that.
WEG Star Wars also set the tone for games I would come to like in the future. It had a currency that allowed players to be heroic when they needed to and felt success was really important. It has a single mechanic that was applied across every part of the game, whether you were resolving things between characters or spaceships it was a very similar process. It’s no surprise I came to like the everything is a character approach of Fate some years down the line.
The contents of the 1st edition WEG Star Wars book sit with me until today, so much so I even purchased it when it was re-published and I never make nostalgia purchases.
Vampire: The Masquerade
When it comes to the impact Vampire: The Masquerade had it’s a bit more like Golden Heroes than WEG Star Wars. You see WEG Star Wars back up what it advocated with its system, Vampire: The Masquerade was entirely the opposite. As such the impact it had is more related to what it espoused to be about even if the system and supplements didn’t back that up in the slightest.
It was a bit of a 90’s thing, talk one thing but, at best, ignore it in the system or at worse have your system pursue a totally different agenda. Vampire: The Masquerade essentially did the latter. But sometimes just talking about something is enough and Vampire: The Masquerade talked a lot about drama and this changed my games.
The games included more romance. They included more sex. The included stories that had these elements as important factors. Since it was Vampire it also included twisted versions of more adult themes. While the system may have been irrelevant to proceedings the random ramblings in the books did change the content of my campaigns. Not all of this was due to Vampire: The Masquerade’s penchant for waxing lyrical about drama, some of it was the nature of it being about vampires
It’s also true that space opera and Marvel-like superheroes sets a certain tone and, again, Vampire: The Masquerade was different. It was was personal horror with a dramatic bent and despite the system, it changed things.
Fate
When the whole Indie RPG and Storygames movement kicked off, and I am not going to try and define either term, I had one big problem with it.
They tended to throw everything out.
This is the general trajectory of movements that begin as a reaction to the status quo. If the status quo is at the left of the line then the ideas as a reaction will be at the opposite end. It takes a while for things to shake out and for the new ideas to realise that actually throwing everything out and being so crazily radical isn’t the only option. This meant that for a while the games produced were fantastic for the ideas they proposed but very few of them were games I’d actually want to run.
Fate was the first that really enthralled me. It scored two big hits, as Spirit of the Century was pulp awesome and it was embedded with what I’d come to understand as fiction first. The goal of the system is an intentional story, but it still has a lot of the structure of what felt like an actual TTRPG.
There isn’t really anything like a perfect system, but Fate probably comes closes to it at the point this blog is written.
It’s fiction first, but still very traditional in its structure. It codifies things in a way that works on an execution level rather than being overly obtuse. It allows for who a character is to be as important to proceedings as what he can do. It allows for character development through power growth but also fully supports dramatic change and growth. It even has a set of odds embedded within the dice rolls that are easy to interpret. Everything is a character is ingenious and liking that goes back to WEG Star Wars.
Ultimately it’s flexible. While it favours very proactive, competent and dramatic characters, which is fine with me as that is true for anything I run, it’s very flexible in terms of what you can use it to run and also how you deliver it in game. The most important thing? It’s not about learning the facts of the rules, the artistry of the game is how you apply them in the session and in the moment and that is brilliant.
Fate is the fiction first game that finally delivered on what I want TTRPG’s and sessions to be. The approach I’d been wrestling with for a very long time before even the concept of fiction first was an understood thing.
It influences my gaming because it allows me to run games how I want and not fight the system in the slightest.
And, Finally…
You know what the most interesting discovery of writing this blog post was? I’ve run very few games. This isn’t a complete list of what I’ve run but anything else has been sporadic and not for long. I did run a FASA Star Trek series which was an intentional eight episodes long, but beyond that I’m having trouble thinking of anything other than what’s been listed here.
That was…surprising.
I do believe my TTRPG journey has been defined by two factors. The first being that I didn’t have a traditional, highly Dungeons and Dragon influenced introduction and formative apprenticeship and I think this is a big thing. When your formative gaming experiences are an emulative experience of a TV show you’re getting off to a different start.
The second thing is I spent the whole of my time running TTRPG’s looking for a fiction first experience before I knew what it was (or anyone else did). I even spent the majority of my time as an armchair game deep into discussing games during the ‘indie movement’ looking for fiction first and it’s why the games never fully worked for me despite liking the philosophical shift. I didn’t want radically different ‘story games’ that threw everything out – I just wanted fiction first.
There is an argument to say I should write about the most influential games I haven’t played? Possibly one day.