Friday, October 17, 2008

Gaming Systems

Shamus Young asked some questions a couple days ago that I just saw. I'm going to answer them in the interest of
1) Letting my readers know what my gaming background/experience is
2) Having something to blog about tonight since I still haven't received/written any more character stories for the new campaign
3) Thus having an opportunity to point out that less than 14 hours remain to give me your input on the current Weekly What the Heck

Anyway, Shamus asks:
  1. What gaming system did you start with when you were learning the game?
  2. What’s your preferred gaming system when you’re running a game?
  3. What system do you prefer as a player? (For some people this is different from #2.)
  4. And because we live in an imperfect world: What system do you actually end up using?
I answer:
1) My very first exposure to RPGs was the Moldvay Basic Set, followed quickly by AD&D 1st edition. Throughout my high school career I heard rumors of other game systems, but didn't really believe them.
2) I love the ease of building and running encounters in D&D 4e. I have never been a heavy immersion gamer, and never been in heavy immersion groups, so I'm fine with "pushing my piece around and selecting my attack options" as Jeff Rients puts it. 4e is what I've always wanted D&D to be - wargaming where at least one side in the war is a crack team of uber badasses instead of a mob of shlubs.
3) I hope I love 4e from the other side of the screen, but as I mentioned yesterday I won't find out for a couple of days. I actually have a soft spot in my heart for GURPS, our system of choice when I was in college. The actual playing was cumbersome, but the character building... oh, the character building! I have reams of GURPS Supers characters who will never be played, but that's OK - just creating them was more fun than playing them would be anyway. I can think of at least one GURPS Supers character who was spoiled for me after I actually played him.
4) Maybe my world is more perfect than most - my group has followed me to 4e and shows no sign of stopping.

1 comment:

ChaoticBlackSheep said...

We used to game a lot in Iron Heroes. I thought I'd hate it because of the focus on combat over magic, but I grew to really love it because the interface was so smooth. I'm surprised you didn't mention that system as well.