Miscellaneous Debris

It might be worthwhile to get some idea of what everybody's personal tastes as a player are since such things (IME) tend to influence what kind of designers we are/aspire to be. Me?

I like games with a heavy focus on genre emulation or verisimilitude. Typically, this means that I like games with a fair amount of rules, though it has nothing to do with liking complexity (in fact, I very much dislike complexity if it outweighs the payoff in actual play).

To illustrate, I very much enjoy Capes but not Champions. The former game manages to achieve the same level of genre emulation as the latter with roughly 400 less pages. Likewise, I'm a fan of HarnMaster but not so much D&D 3x (of course, D&D is much a genre unto itself).

I like the thrill of the game, not so much the role immersion.

We're playing two games a week, both set in Ptolus using (mostly) the same players.

One of them is free-form anything goes style 3.5e D&D pretty much as Ptolus is meant to be played. The other same is much, much grittier and deals with the evil daily undercurrent of life in Ptolus. That's using Warhammer RPG, and it's a perfect match. As one of my players commented: D&D is the Justice Society. Warhammer is a corrupt beat cop in Hell's Kitchen.

The two games are operating in tandem is an intertwined plotline, and it's working remarkably well.

When we need a break from the OTT cinematic optimism of D&D or the bleakness of Warhammer we crack open Microlite20 (yay!) for a session and had a blast. My last session with that was set entirely in a masked ball, complete with a CD of 14th century dance tunes running in the background. Oh, and murder most foul. Oh yes.

Beyond that I've played Traveller (a lot), Rolemaster (even more - and still my all-time-favourite system), classic D&D (the Rules Cyclopedia is the best RPG resource ever created. Ever) and more superhero RPGs than you can shake a Galactic Atomizer at. HERO system ended up being the system of choice, but that's only after wading through MSH, Golden Heroes (remember that?), DC Heroes, V&V and more. I guess we liked the mega-tweakery of it.

If I returned to superhero gaming now though (and I will. I've a plot planned), it'll be with Mutants and Masterminds, because I'm itching to try it out.

Overall it's a mixture between rules-lite (M20) and rules super-heavy (Rolemaster). I guess that I look more for consistency in the rules (hence, I hate 2nd edition AD&D with a passion) over quantity. So long as they make sense, they work for me.

I'm a big fan of consistency in rules which means that I have learned to love games as crunchy as D&D 3x and as light as The Window. The key is that they both have a central resolution system. Games like Burning Wheel, as sexy as they are on some level, drive me nuts (because they contain a different mechanical subsystem for pretty much every action).

I just got Pirates of the Spanish Main from Compleat Games about 2 weeks ago and have fallen in love with the Savage Worlds rules system, light enough to make me happy and to make the game flow, but detailed enough to make it interesting.

Thorne wrote:....
I like games with a heavy focus on genre emulation or verisimilitude. Typically, this means that I like games with a fair amount of rules, though it has nothing to do with liking complexity (in fact, I very much dislike complexity if it outweighs the payoff in actual play).

....

I like the thrill of the game, not so much the role immersion.

The opening post sums it up well for me. I tend to ignore or modify complex rules in games I love for the genre emulation (e.g. Aftermath! love the game except for the melee combat system).

These days I play a homemade system, which I hope to post here. I also hope to post a log of play sessions under this system as well.