Role Playing Games (Revised 2022)

[Updated 2022.   With "Stranger Things" bringing '80s nostalgia, including D&D, back into mainstream attention, it's time to revisit this topic.]

It all started back in September 1981, when our friend Danton came back to Paris from summer vacation in the US. He got us hooked on a new type of game: the role playing game, with character sheets and strange dice – d4, d8, d10, d12, d20, as well as the common d6. We started off with Dungeons & Dragons for one night and the next day started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (commonly known as AD&D).

For those of you who know what these are, this will be a nostalgia trip. For others, maybe I’ll be able to clue you in. You create a fictional person – a character – in a make-believe world, with stats (strength, wisdom, intelligence, constitution, dexterity and charisma) and hopefully a few comrades to share the journey (a fellowship) and if you’re really lucky, a good Dungeon Master (DM) with a sense of humor and a good imagination, who understands the rules as well as you do and isn’t an arbitrary SOB. You start off simply and easy, clueless and weak, but after killing off a few weak monsters and grabbing their measly copper pieces, you work your way up to stronger monsters with better loot, and accumulate power, spells, gold, magic items, etc. Yeah, it’s all in your head, so if your imagination sucks, the game will too. But for those of us who could handle it and enjoy it, it was a trip.

AD&D. The most popular, by far.  Generally referred to as D&D, in practice most players are actually playing AD&D, which is the standard version; D&D itself is actually pretty basic and dull compared to AD&D.   It’s closest to Tolkien and Middle Earth, though they called hobbits “halflings” and wizards “magic-users”, warriors were “fighters” (not “sword-users”). The combat doctors were clerics (not “mace-users”) (though no one seemed to care which deity you worshipped and the spells were all the same anyway) and for traps and locked doors, we had thieves (“lockpick users”?). My top character was a 13th level cleric of Thor, with my 2nd favorite a drow (black elf) fighter-magic-user. We played this one for ages, working our way through all the mainstream modules, most notably “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”.

For all its simplicity and popularity, though, the game was fairly unrealistic and most of the rules were somewhat arbitrary. Automatic parries? No dodge? All your skills go up equally when you go up a level? Rigid classes – fighter/ranger/paladin, cleric/druid, magic-user/illusionist, thief/assassin – with level limits for non-human races? All magic-users and clerics get the same spells? And this business of clerics not using edged weapons, or magic-users and thieves being severely restricted on armor and weapons. Don’t get me started on alignments – good/neutral/evil vs. chaotic/neutral/lawful, and most bizarre, “alignment languages”. Bah. And no one really developed a coherent idea of WHERE this was supposed to take place (e.g. did anyone seriously use Greyhawk?). The most obvious, Middle Earth, was not an option (I don’t think TSR ever got the rights). Swords and sorcery, sure, but very little depth. But we enjoyed it for awhile, at least until we discovered RuneQuest (see below).

Main personal character:  Trumgeld, 13th level cleric of Thor.  

Top Secret. Also by TSR, this time a spy RPG set in contemporary Earth. My guy was a German BND agent who carried an MP40; my brother’s CIA character carried a shotgun. We followed through quite a few modules of this. I recall one adventure where my bloodthirsty comrades literally killed everyone (even those who weren’t on a hitlist) and took everything that wasn’t nailed down, even down to a sack of potatoes (it must be worth something to the agency!). Crazy Top Secret rule: a grenade does 1d10 damage, so it’s theoretically possible to survive a grenade attack at point blank range and get no more than a scratch.

Main personal character:  Fritz Muller, agent of BND (West German intelligence).

Gangbusters. We must have played this TSR game set in the 1920-30s about 15 minutes. Not bad, but too few modules. Also, TSR had this odd policy – completely different than Chaosium – of literally developing an entirely new game system for each different RPG they developed. Because we’re playing gangsters and FBI agents in '30s Chicago means we need a completely different system than spies shooting each other up in the 1980s.

Star Frontiers was the TSR space RPG, which wasn’t too impressive. I suppose the high point was having a race of intelligent amoebas. Cool.

Gamma World. Think you can survive a post-apocalyptic nuclear holocaust world? Check this one out. TSR did a decent job of this one. The best part was all the mutations. I had a huge argument with the DM about PST (pure strain humans) being immune to mutation. My top guy was a PST, go figure – the only race without any mutations at all. The weapons were almost as cool as the mutations.

Main personal character: Urchin Clapton, pure strain human

Traveller. I can’t remember who made this one, but it wasn’t TSR. This was an RPG set in space, in the distant future. All the books were small and black, and the whole thing was played with d6, which was unique among RPGs. Unfortunately, the most fun of all was CREATING the character. Developing his (or her) military career until mustering out was more fun than playing the game itself.

MERP. Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) managed to get the rights to do a Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) game – and dropped the ball completely. Its game system was indecipherable. Sure, you could really be a hobbit, an elf, a dwarf, a Dunedain, or a Beorning (but not a Balrog...damn!) but why would you want to, where would you go, and what would you do? There were no modules, only sourcebooks. Our friend Myles, usually our DM, quoted the Moria sourcebook: “There are lots of dwarves here.....” Uhh, yeah. And there are elves in the forest, and orcs in the dungeons. Thanks, we’ll take it from there.

Call of Cthulhu. Starting the Chaosium games. Chaosium started off with RuneQuest and did the smart thing of simply re-using its basic system for all the other games it made, with slight variations. This one was based on the H.P. Lovecraft stories and extremely well done. The killer element here was SANITY. In other games you can get wounded or killed (boring!). Here you risked going completely insane – cool! Moreover, this was one system with an amazing array of adventures supporting it. They seemed to put out more than we could handle. Surprisingly, despite dozens of Lovecraft stories to draw upon, the writers managed to develop original scenario plots yet remain faithful to the Mythos and ideas of the stories. My favorite two characters were Charles Marx, a West Point graduate and veteran of “The Great War” (aka WWI); and Muller, a German member of a little known reactionary party known as the NSDAP – who also fought, on the other side, in the Great War (I made him the father of my Top Secret character). This was a game we kept up with, mainly because the support was so fantastic. I’ll never forget that one where the DM rolled a “critical” (.01%) for finding a ladder when we needed it!

Main personal character:  Charles Marx

Stormbringer. Chaosium tackles Elric and the Young Kingdoms, the Michael Moorcock books. Modest support, but still fun. My top character was a Melnibonean warrior-sorceror, Jermyn Relic. Thanks to a module called “Hall of Risk”, he managed to create Demon Armor which was practically impenetrable and a Demon Sword which could do 2d8 + 97d6 damage (far more damage than Elric himself could have done with Stormbringer) – and he was an Agent of Arioch. Maybe he got a little TOO powerful. The Chaos characters had the most fun, and if you weren’t from Melnibone or Pan Tang and at least a sorceror of some sort, you were almost certainly dead meat. My first character, Ozzic of the Purple Towns, did OK, but it was Jermyn Relic I liked the most.

Main personal character:  Jermyn-Relic, Melnibonean Agent of Arioch.

Superworld.  Also by Chaosium.  After "The Boys" maybe we should play this again.  You make super heroes and role play them.  Somehow they get a variety of superpowers, handicaps, and even hero points.  Since it was from Chaosium it shared their skill-based system.  My own character, Necroman, got into trouble for actually killing a supervillain, which I found out the hard way was a no-no.

Main personal character:  Necroman

RuneQuest. Finally. This was, by far, the best of all the RPGs. My high school buddies turned me on to this one, and I loved it far more than any of the others – I was addicted. Chaosium started RQI and II, and Avalon Hill perfected it as RQIII. By now it’s gone through multiple changes since 1986, so the current version could be called RQ VII.  We actually played a brief scenario of this last year with our gaming buddy before he returned to Germany, but changes in the game meant we had to create new characters to do so, and we didn't have time to do much to develop those characters.  

Where do I start? Skills you develop individually – and can master beyond 100%. Anyone can use any weapon or armor – no arbitrary limitations or classes. If you want to be a sorceror and wear full plate armor, or be a priest and carry a sword, go right ahead. Priests worship specific deities and different gods give different spells: combat and death spells from the war god (Humakt), healing spells from the healing god, etc. so you have an incentive to join specific cults, and cult allegiances provide incentives for friendship – or war (and thus plenty of scenario inspiration). The “gods” catalog listed the requirements to join cults, the benefits of each one, and the special spells each one provided – NOT like AD&D where all gods give you exactly the same thing and they’re listed with combat stats as if you’re actually going to meet and fight them. Come on.

Depending on what cult you belonged to, if you mastered (90%+) 5 or more specific skills (usually combat skills) you could become a Rune Lord – and RQIII combined priesthood (reusable badass spells) with Rune Lord for the top combat cults. Becoming a RuneLord of a combat cult was one of the top goals of the game for your character, and when you achieved that status – developing a character from a clueless, wuss of a peasant into a bas-ass death machine (e.g. Luke Skywalker’s transformation from Tattoine farmboy into Vader-nailing black-uniformed Jedi) – you felt fantastic....even though this was a completely fictional character (!). It’s hard to describe if you weren’t into it.

 RuneQuest chucked wisdom as an attribute and substituted size (SIZ) as a quantified number, not merely small/medium/large as in AD&D. The monsters had the same format as player characters, so theoretically you could use any monster as a PC, though as a practical matter the “races” – human, dwarves, elves, trolls, broos, ducks, morocanth (intelligent tapirs), and dragonewts – were the most suitable.

 The combat system alone was fantastic. 10x more realistic AND no less playable than AD&D. Hit points per location (arm, leg, etc.) and not merely general hit points. Armor points to be exceeded by damage to inflict wounds: not this arbitrary nonsense of “armor classes”; you roll to hit and then roll damage to see if you actually penetrate armor. You could get special hits – impales – and critical hits, ignoring armor; and even screw up big time: fumbles. You have to roll to parry or dodge. A parry, if successful, added the armor points of the parry item (usually a shield or a two-handed weapon) to the armor on your body; a successful dodge, if rolled, avoided all damage. There were hit points per location, and you rolled a location when hitting, not merely doing general damage (so you could decapitate someone) and even aim blows at specific locations, strike to destroy a parrying weapon (e.g. shield) or for knockback (to push someone back or over).

Skills were on a percentage basis, from base level (the level of someone with no training or experience), up to 100%, but somewhat oddly, the game let you advance past 100% in skills.  Rolling below the skill number on d100 (usually two d10, one for the 10s and another for the 1s) was a success.  96-100 is always a failure (fumble) no matter how high your skill.  Rolling under 20% of your skill was a special (impaling weapons do double damage), and under 5% a critical (weapon does maximum damage and ignores armor).  Every skill successfully used on an adventure can be rolled to increase, so gradually you achieved mastery (> 90%) in various skills.  As noted you have to roll to parry or dodge.

 Magic: three different types of magic, which theoretically anyone could learn. Spirit (“battle”) magic was the easiest to get but the weakest, but at least a simple warrior could have a healing spell without being a priest. He couldn’t raise the dead, but he could patch himself up. Priests, for their part, do get the most powerful spells, divine magic, including Sever Spirit (death spell) and Resurrection (you can figure that one out). RQIII added sorcery, with its own rules; mainly it made spellcasting very skill-intensive and added wizardry as an art, something which had been missing in RQII. There are even spirits, spirit combat, and shamans.

 Glorantha. RQI & II were based in a proprietary world, Glorantha, with its own races, gods, and mythology. They actually fleshed it out more than Middle Earth (who are the gods of Middle Earth?). While RQIII divorced it, in theory, from Glorantha, nominally setting it in "Fantasy Earth", as a practical matter we only played in Glorantha. The races were well done, particularly the trolls (darkness race originally from Hell, with a sonar that let them see in total darkness), ducks (yes, like Donald and Daffy) and broos (goatlike race of chaos who urinated on everything, could impregnate any living being, even other males, and spread disease). Even chaos was introduced as a concept: a foul, degenerate force of impersonal enthropy which corrupts whatever it touches, spewing bizarre montrosities such as broos, scorpion men (a centaur variant based on a scorpion instead of a horse), jack’o’bear (bear with jack-o-lantern for a head), walktapus (man with octopus for a head....like Cthulhu) and gorps, amorphous acidic blobs. The chaos cults had the baddest spells. Add in chaotic features – bizarre mutations so that no two broos were the same – and you have a recipe for some crazy stuff.

Basically it all came together with RuneQuest, which is why it was my favorite. Unfortunately, our gaming buddies all went off to different places after high school, scattered across the globe: Canada, Ireland (our best and irreplaceable DM), Germany, and combine that with the “wife & kids” deal. As you may suspect, our gaming group was 100% male, except for a brief spell in junior high when I DM’ed a group of female classmates for AD&D for a few weeks (it was fun while it lasted).

Main personal characters:  Necrovern, human Sword of Humakt; Detruncari, High Priest of Dark Truths, Thanatar; Lenyn Frehwynd, Wind Lord of Orlanth; Sweet Leaf, green elf Wood Lord of Aldrya and Light Servant of Yelmalio; Uzzy Uzko, dark troll Death Lord of Zorak Zoran; Dark Zunk, dark troll Karrg's Son of Kyger Litor and acolyte of Argan Argar; Clovehoof Bladebroo, broo Sword of Humakt; Lemmy Atum, tusk rider adept sorceror