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"I need D6........lots of D6"

Coming from D&D, Night's Black Agent's was a huge change for me

Uh, also Undying and Primetime Adventures!

Tales From The Loop - such a simple system that takes up a fraction of the pages most games use. Mothership - just super-cool and easy, brilliantly presented (especially the GM book).

Jason Statham’s Big Vacation.

Fudge #ttrpg is the first game which changed my perspective on what tabletop RPGs could be. Then I discovered games like Amber, Theatrix, Aria, Fiasco, Bluebeard’s Bride, For the Queen, etc.

Traveller.

Call of Cthulu / Hunter the Reckoning let me see Ordinary Bloke was a viable character archetype.

As someone who started with the Red Box in the 80s, Marvel Superheroes from TSR. The idea of modeling a character, and a morality system as both advancement and means to be creative were some wild ideas compared to D&D Land.

Hero System. You could build exactly what you want, no trying to wedge your idea into someone else's.

It's hard to say, because I encountered Toon, Teenagers from Outer Space, and Paranoia before my concepts of "how TTRPGs work" really solidified. Also our junior high gaming group played a version of Snit's Revenge with stats from Tunnels and Trolls. Risus was probably my next eye-opener.

Vampire: The Masquerade. Imagine if your characters weren’t all murderhobos and were wrestling with their humanity? Just kidding they all loaded up with dragon breath rounds and basically just played Shadowrun with d10s… but at least I could dream.

shadowrun was the one that made me realize a setting can be a whole second game. the gear, the slang, the jobs. instant rabbit hole.

You're built different. Respect.

I came into the hobby with HERO, V:tM and a pamphlet about Trinity, so im a weird outlier. Didn't play actual D&D until like 5 years later.

I think Mutants and Masterminds really showed what a d20 sysrem should be but I had Palladium (Rifts) and West End Games D6 systems before then as well as World of Darkness, Traveller, Warhammer Fantasy RP, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Mechwarrior, and others.

5e is generally fine, it does everything you expect a TTRPG to do, there's just no one thing you look at and say "it does X really well" because it just does everything with a kind of mediocrity. I also feel like it has the training wheels welded on and no matter what you do they never come off.

AD&D, AD&D 2e, BECMI, those are nostalgia editions for me. I know they weren't exactly "good", though some people made THAC0 way harder than it had to be, but they were still enjoyable at the time. Even back then though there were always better playing alternatives than D&D.

Yeah, D&D 3e was the one we played, really. We didn't make it through the entire one-shot my buddy ran of 4e, and 5e felt like it wasn't a good fit for anything, lol. I've read OSE and some other retroclones but never ran/played them. I find Dragonbane is everything I wanted from D&D 3e...

Choir of Flesh. Has a dynamic target number for combat that shifts and an enemy action table that responds to how damaged the enemy is. More wounds more heal or support actions used. Combine this with a management phase, building and upgrading with a procedural loop of exploration via point crawl.

Dogs in the Vineyard (even though I played it only once) by showing just how ultra-focused an RPG can be.

Cypher System, World of Darkness (WoD20), and Kult.

The first one was Vampire the Masquerade with superlative Tim Bradstreet art as a bonus.

Lace & Steel by @pauli-kidd.bsky.social. Running it taught me so much about how to run games, but also about how to _use_ games. It fundamentally altered the way I run games, and I still basically run games the same way now (albeit with a lot of lessons learned).

Gamma World I believe the 3rd ed. Frist not really fantasy not totally sci-fi with a lot of interesting stuff going on. friend at school ran us through the whole adventure set for it when you find a space shuttle.

Champions 5e

- RuneQuest, because suddenly knifes could kill - Shadowrun, because suddenly the world had to make a semblance of sense - Tales From The Loop, because IYKYK (Grew up on DSA and won't ever go back to that)

Champions! PCs aren't random? How? They can have any superpower imaginable? What? They're not a specific race or class? EMBRACE THE CHAOS!

Same here! EotE blew my mind The first few scenes we played felt like scenes from the original trilogy escaping from stormtroopers The dice made the narrative bob and weave and prompted us all to toss out creative ideas The perks and skills made every character unique It was great!

But that said, LARP had a much bigger impact on how I see TTRPGs than any one game ever could.

Amber Diceless. Dice hate me. It's mutual. Playing without randomizers is freeing.

Vampire the Masquerade, Symbaroum (literally just doing D&D better lmao), and Only War. These were all combat games but importantly they were not SLOW combat games.

Polaris, Amber, Vampire, Urban Shadows, Fiasco. Oh yeah I also made my own 'the last ninja' ttrpg which had no to hit rolls and all weapons did a set amount of damage, so I invented no roll combat in -87, eat your heart out OSR goblins, I just didn't tell anyone. ^^

The original SWRPG did a lot for adding flexibility without complexity, and when all you need is 2d6, that’s a win. But I think Big Eyes Small Mouth was a lovely way to make preexisting worlds viable for interesting gameplay without awkwardly shoehorning them in.

I was lucky enough to have a lot of systems exposed to me when I began gaming in the mid-80's but the idea of a universal system (GURPS 3rd) felt like a wild concept. One book for any genre!?! #ttrpg #gurps

Fabula Ultima. While it isn't crunchy like the other games I run I still love it. Really is neat how the players can impact or even change the world with FP. With Fabula it really does collaborative storytelling so well. Plus the JRPG framing and theming of things is very fun.

Solo specific, but I learned to do investigation missions from one solo game, but I unfortunately forgot what its name was. It was about investigating an art piece theft though

I weirdly can't think of one so far... I feel like my vision of TTRPGs is a bit too wide for that (for best and worst). But I defo note down every answers I'm unfamiliar with here

Medieval people bathed and DnD isn't even accurately medieval anyway! I'd apologize for being such an insufferable nerd about that, but, well, we're already talking about DnD here.

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. I understood that the infinitely-desirable lure of Experience could be used to shape the nature of the game, but it never occurred to me that setting the conditions for acquiring it could reproduce the structure of an anime series. Brilliance.

Cypher system

D&D/OSR encouraged making optimal decisions for your character/the party RP focused games of the 90s-00s encouraged really getting into character and doing what they would choose, not what's best PbtA encourages making decisions with the most interesting results, even if "bad" for your character.

Blades in the Dark for sure. The concept of clocks changed the way I run all my games.

Savage Worlds. It has given me the creative freedom that tighter systems make difficult. Couldn't do a fantasy/sci-fi/superhero genre mash up with D&D rules.

In the old days of AD&D ... the games of original Top Secret, Star Frontiers, and DC Heroes showed me more of what could be possible. More recently, "Monster of the Week" is the most instructive for me, although and i bring those aspects into games of D&D 2024+ rules.

Fate Core by @evilhat.bsky.social . Character creation just means writing down what makes your character interesting, rather than choosing from a pre-approved list of "cool" ideas and then doing fights with them.

Back in the day that was Runequest. The adventures and adventurers took place in a world. And the system could be just that, a system without losing the fun.

It is my favorite, though objectively it's clunky as shit about a lot of things. Full auto is hard to get right, okay, they're doing their best.

DRAGONBANE!

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Dread, though I have never played it.