We’re into September and my deadline for this list is September 30th. I won’t be doing this to the detail I perhaps hoped, but while “gaming life as lens to examine whole life” is a worthwhile project, it’s also less essential that “actually making up new shit.” So I will be moving quicker now. I suspect most of these will be capsules. However, I’m also aware there’s some games I do want to write more about – if I ever end up writing more down the line about them, I’ll edit a link into the piece or something. Or some master list document. I don’t know. I’m winging it, everyone, I’m winging it.
Anyway – my seventy-ninth-favourite TTRPG I played before I was 50 years old was…
79) Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
The world’s most popular roleplaying game, they say. Not with me, it’s not.
Actually, I don’t mind it – it’s clearly well put together and polished for what it does. It’s a weird one that it’s only came out after I became micro-famous, which had led to me only playing it on stage or in charity livestreams, usually with comedians. You mostly know how to place yourself there: which is the straight man. That said, I did once get the Questing Time audience to go ooh when I actually used knockback off a spell to solve a problem, as they realised I actually knew how to play games.
I lie: I actually have played the game properly twice. One was when a writer was in town, got folks together around 10pm, at which point everyone spent 2 hours making characters and I’m not sure if any game was actually played. The second was in long Sunday oneshot. I was quite looking forward to it, as the idea of battlemaps actually strarted feeling almost transgressive and experimental – I even painted a little mini. Except it was such a bad culture clash that I still chew over the session of how I could have handled it better and aligned our expectations. But after about 5 hours getting to a place we could have got in 2, ending in a fight where a player got very lucky with a hold spell, turning the final (only) fight into something more like working in a slaughterhouse, and then me having to leave before it was over anyway (the problem I saw coming 5 hours earlier), it didn’t exactly endear me to it.
The reason I don’t pursue joining D&D games is basically the reason I avoided Rolemaster back in the day- my time is too fucking short for this kind of nonsense.
This was actually higher up the list, but I’ve got so annoyed again writing it up, I’ve moved it here. Oh, so mercurial.
78) Polaris
Classic GMless Forge-era storygame I played once in a short series, and while I admired its austerity, my main memory is a mild annoyance that the group wasn’t into the idea of a character having half their head replaced by a miniature sun. If the list is based around “what I remember” poor old Polaris is mugged by my nonsense brain.
77) The Haunting Of Holly Street
Two player duet-game horror story which takes the Brindlewood-bay-esque Postmodern mystery system and makes it work with two players. Neat way to try it out with two, but I suspect you’d get more for jumping on one of the full versions.
Another suffering from the only-played-a-one-shot, memory-no-good curse. High stakes PBTA action which I played in a Star Wars hack (“Escape From Rancor Island”). Oddly, the ties to the established fiction made it harder for me – I felt my moves more constrained than they would normally be. “I’m playing a C3PO-droid! I can’t do that” I thought, until way too late in the game.
75) Black Sword Hack
Moorcockian OSR that I only played a one off and I mainly remember it for having the most amazing world-creation system that created a febrile sword & sorcery setting with so few moving parts. But I don’t remember what we did or the setting, so here it is.
74) 10 Candles
Popular indie horror classic and probably the first Play To Lose game I got to table. Players light candles. Character traits are on cards you burn. Dice are rolled, with failure leading to candle extinguishing. When candles go out, everyone’s dead. Go.
Also, I believe the first game I ran for The Group, and an uphill battle in a table of folks who’d never done a storygame like this before. About an hour in, I collapsed on the table and said “Guys – I have NOTHING back here” as any time players got the narrative football they just moved everything to a static position and I had to start again from scratch, with them assuming I had stuff to run like a normal game. Ultimate skill issue stuff, for me and them.
But there is something about 10 Candles that bugs me – the sizzle to steak ratio seems off. It was chewed over at length, to the point where a friend and I have swore never to talk about it ever again, as any time we do, we have a big ol’ fight. That’s not good.
I also never got around to doing my sweet-based hack where you’re going through a Wonka Factory, 10 Candies.
73) Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game
I mean, credit where credit’s due. That’s a fucking cover, both in execuion and idea. There’s lots in the non-advanced version to love – frankly, the older I get, the more I like “You’re an Elf” as a character class. You’re a elf, mate. Doing elf shit, like. I like its choose your own adventure teaching. It’s a rare example of a game of the period having a pretty good understanding of how to introduce itself. It’s probably the classic game I’m most likely agree to play now.
But in terms of my teenage lexicon of games, it’s not really in there. I don’t havet he nostalgia. It did little to define me. One campaign, and all I remember of it is that it’s the first time I played a girl. Not nothing, but nothing to do with D&D.
72) The Wretched
Journaling-and-Jenga game based around you being basically Ripley aboard an escape pod and the Alien is fucking it up, and you are likely dying in space. Record voice-messages, see what goes wrong, pull jenga blocks to not die, in space. Frankly, it’s unfairly low here, as the green vinyl with official drone-pulse soundtrack was my daughter’s favourite thing to put on from the age of 2-3. In fact, I’m bumping it up. More green vinyl, kids. Give it to me.
71) Honey Heist
I feel about Honey Heist the way a certain strand of Dexys fans feel about Come On Eileen. Yes, it’s a banger, but there’s so much other good one page shit Grant has done, and it’s CRIMINAL that they aren’t as big and that’s more than I can BEAR. It’s still loveable – the first game the Curious ran ever, and was the group at its best. She was working through like a classic first-time GM and struggling in the places one mostly does, and the group were entirely rooting for and helping out as much as we can. It’s a memory which makes me smile a lot. Heists are an ideal topic for TTRPGs. In a real way, we are performing heists on our imagination, and escaping – and it only works if we all work together.
That’s a quite positive-sounding entry for somthing 71/101.
70) Maelstrom
I’m very fond of the gamebook period in the UK, where the format for TTRPGs was as likely to be just a Penguin softcover as a big book. I didn’t know it at the time. I played a one-shot of this Tudor-set fantasy game a couple of years ago, and it was just charming. I don’t remember who I played, but I do remember us trying to deal with a Basilisk chick in an OSR manner. Frankly, dealing with a chicken-sized monster who is turning the whole village in stone is a lot of fun.
69) DC Heroes
One of the games I played in the American group, and ran by the guy who first gave me longboxes of comics when I first started my adult crush in that form. This wasn’t anything like the material I was reading – that primairly vertigo, or the sort of DC that a pseudy-21 year old would be into. Our game was a playful romp, where we battled evil and got dragged into the Odyssesy where my bill-and-ted-esque himbo character was allowed to remember anything I could remember from Jason & The Argonauts. As a game, I am still slightly in awe of its exponential stat system, where Strength 2 is twice as powerful as Strength 1, and Strength 3 is twice that of strength 2 and so on. So if Superman has strength 19 and can lift a planet, Superman’s big brother with strength 21 can lift 4 planets. That’s absolutely apex 1980s trad-brain design.
Taking the Ironsworn quasi-PBTA GMless-if-you-wanna system and sticking it in Space. I have noodled with Ironsworn a little solo, but I decided it wasn’t quite enough for this to get in the list – and I didn’t click with this enough to put it higher. Which is a shame – I feel Ironsworn was the game which broke ground in adding and popularising almost-trad mechanic to solo games, and this took it further. Its oracles are great. You really can generate something rich and mechanised from scratch, and then it runs itself.
However, it was our off-week game in the THREEDOM group, to be played with zero-prep when we had to do a skip week in our current game. We only played a couple – which implies that while I admired it, the effort to actually do it was unattractive to us on some level – which makes me suspect the GMless lack of ownership was a problem of us here. The heart doesn’t want what the heart doesn’t want.
67) Fiasco
Talking about games which popularised things, this is the absolute classic storygame which woke people up to the power of just sitting in a circle and making up shit. I suspect this would have done better ten years ago, but now my mental response is similar to when someone suggests we play Settlers of Catan. Remember: when arguing about what boardgame to play, keep fighting: don’t Settle.
66) Hensin!
This is one which could have been a lot higher if we did more than the first session, because the token-based sentiai-game was delightful and led to an NPC I still think about to this day – our mentor, Professor T-Rex. The T is for “Telekenetic”, which is why he has tiny vestigal arms.
65) Psi*Run
Psychic kids on the run – think Scanners, think Akira, think X-men, think a fascinating system where you plug dice into gaps on your sheet to trigger things. Down here as I played once, and not enough has stuck in my head. Fond enough to back the 2nd edition.
64) Unbound
Another game which we only played the session zero of I think of all the time – the strangest child in Rowan Rook & Decard’s line. Speaking broadly, RRD’s thing in their big games is offering you all this strange stuff they’ve cooked up. Unbound is the one where they just give you this generative structure to make something really beautiful on your own. The world we made – explorers trying to steal their actual gods back from their oppressors – was a lot of fun and absolutely emerged from us and the rules herein. It does make me sad that this wasn’t a big hit – that the commercial thing to do in TTRPG space is give folks nouns rather than the means to create your own nouns does depress me a little. And still: I say all that, and I haven’t got unbound to table either. I’m as bound as anyone.
63) Mouse Guard
Despite being a comics person, I’ve never actually read Mouse Guard. Despite being a ttrpg person, I’ve never played Torchbearer. But somehow, the two worlds collide here, with the only game the Dilentette ran for the Group. I had some problems with the system itself (ttrpgs where player skill at a game unconnected with the events they’re simulating in the game bother me – so a tactical boardgame of combat doesn’t trip me, but some guessing game of what action card the opponent has played – as here – does) but the material itself is just great. The mixture of the grounded and the perspective shift just works perfectly – there’s nothing scarier than being a mouse suddenly meeting a fucking weasel down a hole. Except perhaps when a Komodo Dragon wandered into mouse town.
Jim and I wrote about this one, and dug it. Part of me thinks it’s a little low, but it’s the highest directly D&D-derrived game on the list, which means it can have an OFFICIALLY BEST F20 GAME logo if it wants one.
61) To Boldly Hahuko
Let me just quote the full description: “To Boldly Hakuho is a live action online game where players take on the roles of a bridge crew needing to communicate with the AI of a starship who refuses to discuss anything other than Hakuho Sho, famous Mongolian-born sumo wrestler.” Come on. That’s what I’m talking about.
60) Unincorporated
Mostly GMless game which was just charming in its small, cosy precision – basically it’s the only TTRPG where my primary reference is Parks & Recs. A little more classically dramatic rather than sitcom, and not by much, and certainly not when our story started to involve Cryptids. Charming. I said that at the top though. I’ll say it again. Charming.
Next: Maybe another 20 next week? If I do that, wrapping it before the 30th starts to appear not actually totally impossible.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.