Earlier this year, we saw John Harper on the socials having worked out how many TTRPGs he’s played. It was a big number. It made Jim and me sit back and do ours. My initial survey revealed I was just shy of 100. And, as a recovering pop culture critic, I knew what that number meant.
A listicle to end all listicles.
I’m starting it today. I turn 50, and wanted to do a long, playful look at my life and how it has intersected with an art form I’ve loved. This seems like it.
(And, yes, when asked if there was any special treat I wanted for my birthday “Can I have time to start writing a listicle?” says a lot about my damage.)
When I’d finished digging through everything, the list was over 100, so I made some choices to make it a significant number. I lost anything in the LARP space which felt closer to LARP than storygame – so I won’t be telling about the time I played Labyrinth with a bunch of other games journos on a press trip. Any game which involves acting a role but positions itself as a party game? That’s also out, so no Fellas, Is It Gay? or Jolene.
When I played multiple editions of a game, I only include them if I can reliably remember the differences between the editions. So (say) Monsterhearts and Feng Shui will only pop up once.
But we’re getting into spoilers. Let’s get in.
You may note that I may not have defined what “favourite” means. That’s going to be part of the exercise. When arranging the list, I had to chew over what favourite means for me, in terms of my memories, experiences and joys with these games.
Which also means, working out what my least favourites means.
That was easy. I wasn’t sure of anything else in this list, but I knew what was at the bottom.
101) Rolemaster
I love Rolemaster.
It’s one of the games I will inevitably talk to people about, with a clear joy, explaining exactly how fucked up we were in the 1980s. My first RPG was MERPS, which I was given as a 10 year old. MERPS is simplified, easier Rolemaster, which is true, but only in the way “Being a brain surgeon and only having to work on one bit of the brain is probably easier.”
Despite my longest-standing friend David – his first mention, and not the last – having a copy, which I borrow-stole, we never played it. We did flick through it in wonder, and fear, gazing at this numinous text.
When asked about Rolemaster, I probably describe a combat table.
It’s an excellent RPG. It looks like Excel.
So, you’ve got – ooh – let’s say about 100 numbers down the side. You’ve got 20 numbers across the top (armour classes). At each entry, you get up to three values – the number of hit points done, and two letters, which are “criticals”, pointing you at other tables, where you role to see exactly how someone’s eye has been gouged out or whether they’ve tripped over an invisible turtle, and are confused.
A modern gamer would have glanced at this, and basically ran away. Except, in their terror, they’ll have missed a key thing. Look at the top right.
“Broadsword.”
As in, this table is just for using the Broadsword. You want to whack someone with a Scimitar? That’ll be table ALT-22 you’ll be needing, honey.
My quick count gives Rolemaster has 43 tables, describing different ways of inflicting damage. 29 for weapons alone.
None of this is why Rolemaster is my least favourite roleplaying game.
It’s 1997. I’m 21, in the third year of my degree. I’m doing Applied Biology, which means that I spend a year working in a lab. I ended up in Denver.
Spending a year in the USA sounds pretty awesome. It had its moments, certainly, but I was in a city which basically demanded cars to move around in – which I didn’t have. My tendency to walk led me to be arrested as a murder suspect when I made the mistake of walking through a rich neighbourhood months after someone was killed in a break-in and it turns out the leadless cops were just grabbing people who were walking through there, figuring if they were walking, they couldn’t afford a lawyer.
I digress.
The truth was the year was both deeply formative and deeply shit. It’s the year I started reading comics as an adult – starting with the first month where I had no TV in my bedsit, and all I had to read was a copy of Watchmen and a bunch of Satre, and I was too depressed to read the depressing Frenchman, so read Watchmen time and time again. It’s the year when I migrated to the internet, coding my first website. It’s the year when I got actively hands-on involved with a wider fandom, when I ran the internet’s premier Kenickie website. It’s the year I was so bored I spent enough time on MUSHes to both get a typing speed which regularly makes people stop to watch me type and kick-start the RSI that I’ve worked around ever since.
In fact, I was so starved of social life, I even went to play a RPG with strangers for the first time. I’d found an advert pinned to the noticeboard in The Wizard’s Chest, about a weekly game north of town.
A Rolemaster game.
I hadn’t played any actual TTRPGs in my first two years of university. Too much pop music, not having sex or (just as distractingly) having sex. I did a few boffer-LARP games with the university society, but that was dropped when I moved off campus, nearer the clubs, further away from the clubs made of foam.
But I was alone in a strange country, and needed to find my people. I took this long bus ride up this Rolemaster session, at the GM’s beautiful house. I believe I was the youngest there. It was the first time I was playing games with actual adults. Some seemed impossibly adult – they could have even been thirty. The mind boggled.
We sat down to play.
It was fine.
The GM had been running the game for a long time – it felt like a decade-plus long world he clearly loved. It was a pretty standard RPG session. I was playing a Dwarf, because “Short Person” is basically one of my three classic RPG character types. It was character generation and mostly a fight scene, as orcs ambushed us on our way to somewhere or another.
So it was the first time I had to actually face those tables.
It was also fine.
Yes, I mocked it above, and would never play now, but it’s really just a D100 plus modifiers. We had all afternoon to play, so we didn’t mind. It was this or read Watchmen again.
I came back the next week, catching the bus up with the other new player, James, an older PhD candidate.
We sat down to play.
We picked up our journey. The GM describes there’s a tower to the north, in the woods.
The group decides to have a nose, because of course we do.
We explore the tower.
For.
Six.
Hours.
I’m not exaggerating. We were there all day, and did nothing else.
We go into a room. The room is described. Can we search the room? Sure, what do you search. We search everything he’s described. There’s nothing there. We check the door for traps, and then go into the next room, and we repeat. There’s something like a ritual chamber in the basement, but our skill rolls don’t let us tell anything about it. Was there anything to tell? I don’t know. I will never know.
On the walk back to the bus, James and I were chatting about something else, casually, and then it hits us simultaneously. We turn to one another and just go.
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!?”
We decide to leave the group, and try and form one of our own. That’s where my real American RPG adventure begins.
Rolemaster is my least favourite RPG because that experience is my absolute zero. I will never do that again. I will run if I’m in the room of that. If you express a liking for that mode of play, I may run away in case you kidnap me and make me play.
As it was the first game I’d ever played with strangers, it was my first experience of play-culture that was not grown from the minds, guts and groins of a bunch of midland teenagers. It made me better understand what I liked in games. Even then, I knew that I was GMing that, I’d have done it in a “It’s empty, except there’s a weird ritual chamber in the basement’. It made me understand my then-aesthetic, and my aesthetic thought life was way too short to do that ever again.
It’s my least favourite RPG, because it allows me to know what I’m not looking for. There’s games further up the list which are worse memories, where games went bad and I upset someone or walked away upset.
Rolemaster is the perfect least-favourite game because it didn’t go wrong. It went exactly right and it made the one-day of freedom I had a week into a Sisyphean ordeal that I’m still laughing at now.
I salute them. I hope the game is still running. I hope they’re still searching that tower. I hope that they find nothing, for as long as they want to look.
Roleplaying games can be anything you want them to be. That includes “not for me”.
Next: 100-99, probably. Don’t worry, I won’t be writing essays this hefty for all of them.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.
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