the truth only. Based on most played with most nostalgic positive memories( peak highlighted moments ) mixed with quality of game ( in your opinion ) plus the most involved in game ( written adventures, homebrew , world building etc )

#5 James Bond rpg [en.wikipedia.org])

#4 Gamma World [en.wikipedia.org]

#3 Call of Cthulhu [en.wikipedia.org])

#2 Advanced Marvel Super Heroes ( TSR ) [en.wikipedia.org])

#1 Dungeons and Dragons ( B/X , AD&D 1e and 2e ) [en.wikipedia.org]
---come on , the game got me in the hobby and i played it the most!!!

#5 RIFTS. Hate the rules but love the inspiration, artwork, and the setting

#4 GURPS (3rd edition). Fond memories and can still run the game without referring to the rulebooks much. Best magic system of all RPGS IMO.

#3 Shadowrun (1st and 2nd edition). Love the setting and the system...Variable Staging forever!!!!!

#1 (TIE) I can't pick between D&D (pre-2nd edition) and Marvel, both hold a very fond place in my memory and my heart

good picks.

played a gonzo version pf Palladium 2e and it used similar system as rifts ( if memory serves )

#5 Shadowrun 3e
#4 Spellbound Kingdoms
#3 Traveller
#2 Marvel Superheroes
#1 Pendragon

Honorable Mention for 3.5/Pathfinder since that was my introduction to RPGs

Pendragon is the ultimate " underrated rpg " ever.

If role playing games were music genres PENDRAGON would be Progressive art rock

Never played Pendragon, what are some highlights?

Star Wars RPG (D6) West End Games
Shadowrun 2nd Edition
Paranoia (goofy but fun to play, especially when tired)
Marvel Super Heroes (of course!)
Honorable Mention for Robotech's Random Insanity Tables. Gotten some mileage out of that over the years.

Quote
Pel Morba
Star Wars RPG (D6) West End Games
Shadowrun 2nd Edition
Paranoia (goofy but fun to play, especially when tired)
Marvel Super Heroes (of course!)
Honorable Mention for Robotech's Random Insanity Tables. Gotten some mileage out of that over the years.

Which Paranoia? I found the original book hard to get my head around. Not particularly complicated, but it was scattered and hard to put together.

Quote
barna10
Never played Pendragon, what are some highlights?

The highlight really is that the system makes you emulate the source material far beyond anything else I've ever played but doesn't give you a template to follow. For example, the Powered by the Apocalypse playbooks basically achieve genre emulation by strictly controlling your actions, your character development, limiting the effects of the dice, and rewarding playing the way the game wants. Pendragon has benefits and limits to encourage genre imitation, but without taking away the classic RPG experience. The Passion mechanics get emulated often and the trait mechanic is perfect for an Arthurian Knight and it's amazing for generating that soap opera-y drama of the stories. Passion and traits both work by rolling at or under your value and the traits are mechanical representations of your personality while passions are mechanical representations of your desires and values. For example, a powerful love passion can make you a better fighter but it also means you struggle going against your lover and that your likely to spend a lot of your time trying to please them. Many of the game systems work well together and feed into each other making an overall game that feels like it's pushing you through various factors in the same direction while still allowing meaningful choices and interesting game play/decisions.

My choices are going to be variable, since my tastes change from time to time and what i want out of an RPG system changes from time to time, but...

#1 Savage Worlds -- All the universality of GURPS, without all the grit and nuts and bolts and drudgery.
#2 Advanced Marvel Super Heroes - for when you just want to throw together super heroes and have a ready-made scale in place without having to work out just how far past the current stat range you really are, lol. CLASS 1000, baby!
#3 Shadowrun -- My first multi-genre gaming system, and while I haven't played it in years, I still consider it one of the best fantasy/SF combos
#4 Palladium -- All the levelling "fun" of D&D, combined with all the multi-genre awesomeness you could want, plus eighty- or ninety-something martial arts. I only really played this in the 80s and 90s, but I still play a variation of the RIFTS setting in Savage Worlds.
#5 D&D, 1st ed through Pathfinder -- the one that got me started. I'll most likely never play it again, since I think "decades" is enough, but I have to give it a place of honor, lol.

My choices will all change by next week, I'm sure...

Quote
Vowels
#1 Savage Worlds -- All the universality of GURPS, without all the grit and nuts and bolts and drudgery.
.....
#4 Palladium -- All the levelling "fun" of D&D, combined with all the multi-genre awesomeness you could want, plus eighty- or ninety-something martial arts. I only really played this in the 80s and 90s, but I still play a variation of the RIFTS setting in Savage Worlds.
#

Savage Worlds is always well regarded, but I never played. I liked GURPS, but, God, it takes like 10 hours to make a character. I didn't find the actual playing of GURPS to be that bad. Have you played a campaign in it? GURPS used to be cool back in the earlier days of the internet.

Palladium is another game that seems cool, and I've read a little about it and even messed around with it a bit, but I wasn't really captivated by. People like Rifts though. Again, have you got to play a campaign in it? How was the experience?

Quote
Username
Savage Worlds is always well regarded, but I never played. I liked GURPS, but, God, it takes like 10 hours to make a character. I didn't find the actual playing of GURPS to be that bad. Have you played a campaign in it? GURPS used to be cool back in the earlier days of the internet.

Palladium is another game that seems cool, and I've read a little about it and even messed around with it a bit, but I wasn't really captivated by. People like Rifts though. Again, have you got to play a campaign in it? How was the experience?

I attempted some Savage Worlds, but it didn't wow me at all. A friend of mine went around doing demos and ran a campaign for us, an Indiana Jones / pulp thing. His story was fine, system bored me.

GURPS has my favorite magic system (skill-based, uses points). My favorite campaign I ever ran was a Supers campaign. The characters were very cool and rules suggestions of the Supers book changed the system to a 4-color system quite well. Yes, character creation usually takes a LONG time, but the character builder software helps with that. Not a fan of 4th edition, still use 3rd if I play GURPS.

Palladium! I have a love-hate relationship with Palladium. I like the look of the books. I like the feel of the settings. The rules are trash, literal trash. they are like you took a knock-off AD&D system, doused it in lighter fluid, lit it, let it burn for 10 minutes, put the flames out, then tried to read everything and use what you could find to run a game. Typos everywhere, rules that make no sense from book to book, no consistency from class to class.....barf.

Most played plus positive memories?

1. Dungeons and Dragons (various editions, but 3.x has the most time clocked).
2. Rolemaster
3. Palladium system something (TMNT, HU, Rifts, and/or Fantasy mostly)
4. MSHRPG
5. Star Frontiers

[www.chaosium.com]

pendragon struggling towards virtues versus vices internally




hyper real medieval play

Quote
nijineko
Most played plus positive memories?

1. Dungeons and Dragons (various editions, but 3.x has the most time clocked).
2. Rolemaster
3. Palladium system something (TMNT, HU, Rifts, and/or Fantasy mostly)
4. MSHRPG
5. Star Frontiers

Have you played Classic Traveller or any of the other editions? What are the things Star Frontiers does better in your opinion?

Quote
Username

Have you played Classic Traveller or any of the other editions? What are the things Star Frontiers does better in your opinion?

I picked up Traveller (the black books version) from a BundleofHolding sale, because I am very fond of the planetary classification code system. I did enjoy reading through the psionic options from the Traveler SRD site. I still need to get around to finishing reading what I started with the black books. The setting reads old and explored from what I recall

What I liked about Star Frontiers was the simplicity of the system (which also caused occasional hitches because it is either missing what would be a useful piece of info or it is hidden in an odd spot in the rules, old TSR writing style, so...) and the setting. It gave a very rough frontier feel combined with the more polished sci-fi of the cities on the main planets... very in keeping with Andre Norton or E.E. Doc Smith style sci-fi stories. There was enough information to get you started and spark the imagination, yet enough blanks to leave plenty of room to fill in. Basically a pulp-era sci-fi mix: a little retro, a little sci-fi, lots of room for the unknown.

Also, the fact that the human race in Star Frontiers is specifically and explicitly NOT tied to Sol/Terra humans in any way allows one to place the entirety of Star Frontiers pretty much anywhere in the galaxy, or any galaxy, or even universe for that matter... a conceit that the Traveler system (with all of it's glorious timeline and rich historical background, 133 pages and 15 billion plus years of it) does not logically permit.

1 Dungeons and Dragons (v1e/2e) Marvel are tied
2 Twilight 2000
3 Star Frontiers
4 Traveller
5 Gamma World

1. Rolemaster: This will always hold the highest honors to me from when I ran a long campaign in the 90's when in the USN. I discovered Rolemaster in 1983 when the DM (that I gamed with during study hour at my HS) was graduating and he gave me the core RM books. I read through it and was hooked because to me it fixed the things I did not like about AD&D.
2. MSHRPG (FASERIP): Great memories and the most played RPG in my younger years back in the 80's with the friends I got into RPGs with.
3. HARP (High Adventure Role Playing): Rolemaster's younger sibling. I have been playing it since it's inception in the early 2000's, it is no where near as great as Rolemaster but it is much easier for newbies to learn than Rolemaster is.
4. AD&D: I haven't actually played any version of D&D in well over 20 years now (one shots here and there don't count) but this is were it all started (kind of). We did originally start with the basic boxed set in late 1981 but moved onto AD&D as soon as we discovered it. This was run for several years and even for a while here and there after we started playing MSHRPG constantly.
5. Dreamchaser: It is the most genre flexible system I have ever played and if played by the rules it takes a lot of the stressful development work away from the GM. It is my go to system for one shots in any genre. It helps that a good friend created the system.

In truth I have several other systems that I want to try out more extensively than just one shots like (but not limited to): Shadows of Esteren, Fate, The One Ring, Forbidden Lands, Icons, Avatar Legends, and many more.

I've been neck deep into OSR games. ( Old School Revival / Renaissance / etc )

.... but not just D&D retro-clones or the Fantasy genre.

Superhero , Sci Fi , Horror , Historical , Secret Agent etc

Anyone ever tempted or do take a game mechanic or concept fro ANOTHER Superhero RPG and
port it over to MSH - RPG???

something from Champions, DC Heroes , Villains and Vigilantes ??? etc ???

I really want to port advantages and disadvantages into Marvel

The luck power reversing the tens and ones toward the higher number is like that. -

Wouldn't mind if someone did a massive Superhero random non-combat real life ( private and public ) encounter Table

something that could Also effect Popularity and Resources and add sub-plot hooks etc

Quote
G.A.W.
The luck power reversing the tens and ones toward the higher number is like that. -

Wouldn't mind if someone did a massive Superhero random non-combat real life ( private and public ) encounter Table

something that could Also effect Popularity and Resources and add sub-plot hooks etc

I wonder if this is something that could be automated with ChatGPT or some other AI...

Quote
G.A.W.
The luck power reversing the tens and ones toward the higher number is like that.

Sorry, I mean like Champions ads and disadvantages, not 5E's mechanics

It took me awhile to remember where this was or I would have posted it sooner:

Technohol.com - Quirks

Quote
Thrudjelmer
It took me awhile to remember where this was or I would have posted it sooner:

Technohol.com - Quirks

This was ported to CMF - quirks

But I have had issues with power gamers and those in the past

Quote
barna10

Quote
G.A.W.
The luck power reversing the tens and ones toward the higher number is like that.

Sorry, I mean like Champions ads and disadvantages, not 5E's mechanics

I was going to ask if you meant GURPS Supers or Champions, but you beat me to it. =P

Quote
barna10

Quote
Thrudjelmer
It took me awhile to remember where this was or I would have posted it sooner:

Technohol.com - Quirks

This was ported to CMF - quirks

But I have had issues with power gamers and those in the past

I mean, sure... any system is going to have trouble with power gamers. The best thing to do is look at the source material and make changes to suit your game. If there's something that people do or can exploit, then change it. The quirks stuff is definitely not official, so no one can call foul if you do.