RPGaDay Question #18

Question #18: Which RPG have you played the most in your life?

The answer to this one actually has a bit of humorous timing, in that the one RPG that I've played the longest is West End Game's Star Wars d6 system, having started playing it in 1993 while in college (yes, I'm old), and played in some form or another almost continuously until shortly into 2000, at which point my group of the time decided to retire our current campaign and try out WotC's new d20 system.

Now why is this humorous?  Because just a couple days ago, Fantasy Flight Games announced they were doing a 30th Anniversary edition of the Star Wars: The Role Playing Game corebook and the very useful Star Wars Sourcebook supplement, with updated art, paper quality, and sold in a slipcase cover.  If you've not already seen the announcement, you can read about here.

If you discount specific editions of D&D, then that one would also be a contender, though most of the campaigns I was in only lasted a few months at best before whatever story the GM wanted to tell was accomplished or the PCs were wiped out.  Of the editions, I've probably played 2nd edition and 4th edition the most.  Now I've played a bunch of different RPGs that used the 3.X/OGL ruleset, but those weren't D&D and instead were based around other properties, such as Babylon 5, Conan, Mutants and Masterminds (all three editions) and even the occasional oddball such as Mechamorphosis (seriously FFG, this needs to come back as a Genesys splat!)

And of course there was Deadlands (which nowadays would fall under the "Classic" label), of which I managed to run a campaign that lasted just over 2 years before finally running out of juice, and I payed off and on in various campaigns (both short and long) for another couple years.  I had a lot of fun with that system back in the day, playing a few different characters that were quite fun, such as a youngish Templar from the Hell on Earth branch by the name of Christopher Devlin (who in retrospect had a lot of similarities to Michael Carpenter of the Dresden Files with the exceptions of age, family, and wisdom born of age/experience); while not a total paladin (as is often the case with Templars in Hell on Earth) he played it pretty close, which is even more amusing if you know the significance of his particular surname (sadly, the campaign ended before anything ever came of that).  Another fun character was a Chinese martial artist that somehow wound up being called Mike (in spite of his name, which I don't recall, not sounding anything even remotely close to that) by the other characters.  At least it had a funny pay off when my character busted out the Fu powers to leapfrog up the sides of a box canyon to unload a flurry of fists upon a black hatted bandit that'd been harassing the local townfolk, after which a player (his character being a young, good-hearted, and frankly naive farmhand) said with a straight face, "I want to be like Mike."  Given this was during Michael Jordan's basketball hey-day, the phrase made the rest of us crack up laughing and netted the player a blue Fate chip from the GM for not only the timing of the line but being able to keep a straight face for several seconds after saying it.

Hopefully, I'll have opportunities a plenty to add Mutants and Masterminds 3rd edition to the list of long-runners, as well as 7th Sea 2nd edition.  I've had a lot of fun playing Spider-Man in my friend Eric's Emerald City Knights campaign that he runs for mutual friends over Skype, and would very much love to keep playing that character for as long as he's willing to run the campaign.

That's all for today.  Check back tomorrow for the answer to #19 on the list.