Best pen-and-paper RPG world

Fuckin' Dragonlance, man. That's what I play. That and Men In Black.

Blue Planet has a really cool setting, as does Empire of the Fading Suns. My all-time favourite just for the grimness potential was Lovecraftian-Victorian England in Call of Cthulu. Fuck that game is great. Any game where you get half of your party wasted before you reach the objective of your adventure and then have the other half go insane after they reach the objective rocks!

I agree with Ludwig on the CoC setting. Although I would add The Dreamlands to it as well.

Other than that I'd have to say, 'Rifts'. I haven't played this game in years but I continue to buy the suppliments for the simple pleasure of reading.

I am not a huge fan of Rifts because they do not playtest that game nearly enough. The setting is kinda cool, but they let it spiral out of control, and when every supplement that comes out adds like 10 new Character Classes, things get a bit fucked up in terms of play balance. And I have yet to see anyone play a Glitterboy properly in that game. Having said that, SDC is the most clever RPG concept of all time. Mega SDC for games like Robotech from Palladium is even more cool.

Oh sorry. For those of you who haven't played a Palladium game after Beyond the Supernatural where this concept was first used effectively (their original horror game), SDC stands for Structural Damage Capacity, and is a way of keeping track of damage to inanimate objects like armor, doors, buildings, etc. Basically, it is a second set of hit points for armor so that when you get hit with a mighty blow, the armor takes damage first and not you, depending on the severity of the blow. Mega Structural Damage Capacity was used as a concept for the first time I believe in the Robotech game by the same company, and 1 point of MSDC = 1000000 SDC. They did that because some of the capital ships had really big fucking guns.

I was using 'Rifts' as a great RPG world. I didn't say the game mechanics were that great. I agree there are way too many classes available and the whole MDC (Mega Damage Capacity, i.e. things like Mecha, Dragons, Super Heroes, etc.) and SDC (Structural Damage Capacity, i.e. normal humans, fantasy races, Smurfs, etc.) thing made balance between class types difficult (Imagine trying to manage a Dragon, a Wilderness Scout, a Full Conversion Cyborg and an Engineer in the same game.). But, the SETTING was interesting as all Hell.

Hell, I enjoyed the 'Gamma World' setting as well. But, the game was a mess!

I still have all of my Palladium books. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, Robotach, Beyond the Supernatural, Elric and, of course, the Rifts stuff I continue to read.

But, I have to say that my favorite setting and game (which I ran) was a GURPS Horror/CthulhuPunk campaign. What an absolute blast!

I'm waiting on the D20 Cthulu myself...I still love Greyhawk but I'm getting into the new Kingdoms of Kalamar for D&D 3E. When I was younger I was into the Realms but they went way overboard on the detail. WOTC was churning out background supplements but nary a frigging module.

IMHO - the best RPG was Rolemaster as it had, without doubt, the best combat system ever devised.

The most dangerous RPG to play was Paranoia, any person who designs a game in which you shaft your mates at each and every opportunity is pure EVIL

Cthulu - too easy to get killed.

D&D - excellent environment - poor combat system.

Star Wars - good fun.

Traveller/MegaTraveller - the worst combat system in the history of RPG.

MERP - Based on Rolemaster and fun to play.

Gammaworld - liked it a lot but we had a crap GM who gave away all the best weapons in the first session.

Yeah, you definitely do not want to get too attached to a character in Cthulu.

Anyone else waiting on the LOTR RPG? I enjoyed the quality of the MERP game, but it was just too complex...

Too complex??? eek! eek!

Sheesh Matt - that was the 'cut down' version of Rolemaster aimed at people who thought it was too complex. eek!

I can't remember the name of it, but I played a game for a while where the whole game was sort of like a HK movie. The object was high body count. The rules were easy and character genertion took 10 minutes. You had templates like Annoying Kid, Killer, Loose Canon, Martial Artist. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

As for the deepest and most interesting I like Rifts too if you take into account just the base book. We had a Crazy, a Burster, a Dog Boy, a Dragon, and a Ley Line Walker as the core group. Tres Cool.

Needless to say, I never got into Rolemaster. wink

Don't worry, matt. Neither did I...

Anyone play Aftermath in days gone by?

Feng Shui!!!! Thanks Poxy. Don't know how I forgot that. You da man!

Speaking of Cthulhu again...

I have always enjoyed reading the <a href="http://www.delta-green.com/home.html" target="_blank">Delta Green</a> version of the modern Cthulhu Mythos.

This is some tight stuff!

Plus there are several actual books (a novel and some short story collections) and a <a href="http://www.flyinglab.com/deltagreen/" target="_blank">PC game</a> coming VERY soon!

Bumping.

I brought up 'Gamma World' in another thread and it got me thinking about RPGs.

Richard: Nice thread that you started here.

*Paging Rob* *Paging Rob*

This was a GREAT game, but the time taken to create an adventure was truly wasted; the best game of this that we ever played was simply this:

'Go downstairs into the cellar and change the lightbulb'.

Full combat ensued within the first 15 minutes of gameplay, and most of us were on our 5th or 6th clone by the time the world was destroyed in a nuclear war.

Fun stuff.

Dragonlance, for sheer high fantasy goodness.

Darksun for some of the most insanly evil things I have ever done (while roleplaying anyway).

I took over a citystate betrayed all my friends and became an all powerfull being.

Plus I took all the poor people in my city promised them food and shelter then enslaved the lot of them to build me a huge tower.


Good times.

Ken: That sounds like the 'evil' campaign that we did ONCE. Just to get it out of our system, we played through an entire module (don't remember which one, but it was AD&D) in full-on Chaotic Evil mode. It was fun to just let your dark side out, but we all felt decidedly unclean afterwards.

All about Shadowrun. The fact that noone has made a decent video game out of this world (the snes/genesis games were eh) is beyond me. God I miss playing that game.

Dragons + Magic + Yakuza + guns + dwarves = Heaven.

And fuck the 360 game. Retconning and turning the world into shit. Fuckers.

*hugs his Panther Cannon with custom silencer

I played a Cyberpunk/Shadowrun campaign for a while in college. Good stuff.

You know what, I felt the same way after a few games. Even to this day when playing Fable 2 I can't play as an evil charater for longer than half and hour.

I enjoyed the hell out of Doom Town. I enjoyed the card pulling mechanics, the setting was cool (wild west and supernatural!!), and I had a good group at the time.

The best world of darkness I ever played in had all the PC as normal human mobsters completely unaware of the supernatural. It was very amusing when we first went to go 'wack' someone and the guy popped fangs after taking a shotgun blast to the chest.

I fully agree. That game had a lot of cool play mechanics (I still love the DM voice) but would have been so much better using Forgotten Realms.

Delta Green (the modern conspiracy Call of Cthulhu setting) is my absolute favorite. Geoff Foster complained about the ease with whcih you died, but that (to me) was part of the fun. As long as the death was a good death (meaningful or ultraviolent or funny or just plain weird) I never minded. People who get really attached to their characters have psychological problems. The Delta Green fiction was great too, a couple of novels and short story collections.

Runequest's Glorantha was a terrific setting, with a detailed and deep mythology. The game system (also used in CoC, Elric, and other Chaosium games) is, IMO, the best and most sensible system around. No supermen like you would get with D&D; your hit points remained the same as you became more experienced, but your ability to hit, parry and dodge blows increased; however, a lucky blow could always take off a limb or possibly kill you. That's life, and I loved it.

The original World of Darkness, with rich and detailed backgrounds and worldviews for every group (vampires, mages, faeries, etc.) is just staggering for the amount of material. Mage in particular was my favorite, a concensus reality world that a mage manipulated and changed by force of will, and if you weren't strong enough reality would bitch slap you. I never played as much as I would have liked, but I spent many hours just reading the manuals and sourcebooks.

The White Wolf superhero troilogy - Adventure (20's style pulp fiction), Aberrant (superheroes), and Trinity/Aeon (future sci-fi) - were pretty cool. I never got into Trinity, but the first two (especially Aberrant) were quite cool.

Yes, Deadlands. Thanks for the correction, it has been some years since I played. I didn't know they stripped if for the D20 version, but I am not surprised since the whole goal of D20 is to stream-line the rules.

What are peoples opinion on the D20 system? IMHO I feel that I like being able to play in a diverse group of settings, it still feels like I am just playing D&D in a different expansion. I know I perfer the original cthulu and Starwars rules (and apparently Deadlands) because it felt unique.

Well, the nice thing about d20 is that it makes it easy to try out other settings with players that are previously only familiar with D&D. This has greatly worked to my advantage in some cases, as (for example), I could get people to try the d20 versions of "Legend of the Five Rings" or "7th Sea/Swashbuckling Adventures" (two of my favorite settings) and then convince them to try the non-d20 variants once they were more familiar with the settings.

It's the gateway drug of RPGs! But there are a couple settings that used d20 that were outstanding: The Iron Kingdoms setting from Privateer Press is a favorite of mine (too bad support has waned in the era of 4E), and the adaptation that Guardians of Order did for George RR Martin's Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire was freakin' brilliant...probably the best-quality d20 book that was ever published. Too bad the company folded shortly thereafter.

Also quite fond of Shadowrun's setting even if I've often run afoul of the rules. Rifts is a perennial favorite, too, even if the system is rubbish, it's at least fun rubbish.

Yes! Love the 7th Sea world, although I've only played the d10 version.

We incorporated quite a few of the D20 sourcebooks into our campaigns. '7th World' was one of the better ones, iirc.

Yeah, okay, I've only ever played one adventure in it over the course of 2008 but I had a shitload of fun. There weren't any magic users in the party, so I guess we sidestepped that. The only "magic" we encountered was pseudoRussia being vaguely alive like Fangorn, which I thought was pretty cool.

Edit: Dickson, you seem to know the setting better than me. Does the pseudoFrench court have steampunk-y flying orbs and is this publicly known?

Oh boy, my nerd is gonna show big time....

Not all forms of magic were "bad." Just the four particular variants practiced by the "French" "Spanish (though that strain of magic had almost been wiped out)" "Germans" and "Italians." The "Russian" "Danish/Viking" and "British Isles" stuff was still (comparatively) benign and not threatening to destroy reality or whatnot.

However, I completely agree that the more fantastic elements of the game that you mention weren't nearly as compelling as the rest of the setting.

"Steampunk" may be a wrong term for it. The technology was Atlantean (or Syrnethi, I believe).

Another good one: CAR WARS from Steve Jackson games. It wasn't a RPG in the true sense of the word, but your cars would certainly take on distinct personalities. My DnD group would occasionally take a break from the campaign to play a long weekend session of CAR WARS, usually involving several cases of beer and multiple orders to Pizza Hut.

Anyone here playing 4e at all?

Man, nearly a page gone by, and no mention of Warhammer Fantasy? For shame.

The setting is just wonderful, and so fully realized as to be slightly daunting. The books go into extensive detail about the background of the Old World, providing a very rich setting in which to play. Percentile roll-under system based on character-generated stats with an easy learning curve, and a wealth of character choices. The thing starts off with 60 basic career options, encompassing everything from Agitator to Peasant to Troll Slayer.

The world itself is malicious. Mutants, beastment, chaos spawn, mutated bears who eat chaos spawn... it's not pretty. Open-ended damage dice mean any character can potentially be killed in a single blow from any other character.

My favorite aspect, by far, is that it eschews the high fantasy nonsense. It's much more a day-in-the-life of an early-Renaissance German person, and anyone can wind up making a massive accidental impact on the Empire. And hey, the guy who shovels excrement off the street in front of the town hall can save the world.

We've stuck with 3.5e for now; we all have too much money invested in it at this point to just DROP it. I've also heard mixed reviews from people who have played 4e.

I am a fan, but it's a completely different game. I've only ever bought the 3.5 PHB, so I didn't feel like I wasted too much money (pre-empting LOL RP = MUNNEY WAYSTIN response).

Our group has tried it, and to be honest its'....missing something. I don't mean mechanically really, as there were plenty of things we liked about it, but while we had an OK time with it it just doesn't seem to have the same kind of "spark" that some other systems have, and setting information is virtually nonexistent unless you buy more books (of course).

I like the "Points of Light" implied setting. I never really paid any attention to setting information in 3.5, as I just used the three core books and made most stuff up about the world myself. Hell, comparing the 3.5 and 4e core books, there's more info in 4.