James Nicoll Reviews

Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number three is the game that hooked me on roleplaying games: Traveller, Little Black Book edition. 

This is a skill-based science fiction RPG heavily influenced by the likes of Norton, Tubb, and Piper. Despite some unique features (like a character generation system that often killed characters before play), it was the most popular SF rpg of its era. Having navigated many editions, it is still in print today.

This particular edition had the slight drawback that the cost per page was significantly higher than the cost per page of photocopies. This drove an evolution towards perfect bound and hard cover versions.

It established my preference for skill based systems over class. Oddly, I prefer FRPGs to SFRPGs because the world building short cuts needed to make SFRPGs playable vex me.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number two is, unsurprisingly, 1st Ed AD&D. Not my thing but I did play one session.

(Original David A. Trampier cover, not the Jeff Easley they replaced it with in 1983)

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. You might expect my first to have been the then-ubiquitous AD&D--the Windows 95 of roleplaying!--but it was not. Instead, it was John M. Ford's science fantasy Starquest, an extremely simple, four characteristic, class-based RPG that as far as I know was only ever published once, in the pages of the July 1979 Asimov's. It didn't have a cover as such but it did have a George Barr illustration.

Like most good-hearted people, I preferred well delineated borders between my SF and F. This "role-playing" sounded pretty silly to me. I didn't expect the idea to thrive and I certainly did not foresee spending time on it.

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By popular demand¹, ten WTF were they thinking moments from classic RPGs, which I admit is something of a target-rich environment. I will limit myself to games I've actually seen, which means I get to skip past _that_ one.

The 1977 edition of D&D added an orthagonal good vs evil to the law vs chaos morality axis. While humans got freedom of choice regarding where on either axis characters fell, this was not true of some non-human races, which in turn means there are whole races good people are morally obligated to kill when possible. This is by no means unique to D&D but it gets special credit for being the one to establish it as a trope in table-top roleplaying games.

1: Well, a couple of people, anyway.

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This may be a misnamed series, because in this case the detail I am very sure I know exactly what the company was thinking.

R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk (later Cyberpunk 2020) adapted the cyberpunk genre to gaming (and did it without getting the FBI coming down on them like a ton of technically illiterate bricks). As far as the game itself goes, it’s about what one would expect: lots of focus on the surface details of cyberpunk¹, not much awareness of any depth in the fiction. Ah, well. Nothing stopping players from adding layers to their game.

The reason I single R. Tal out is because their cover art inspired me to think about how I shelved games. A large fraction of my clientele were women and I didn’t want the first thing they saw when they came in to be something like this. 

I’d like to think this was because I was a particularly insightful but really, it only occurred to me after I overheard two customers complaining about the porn comics another store kept near the register to reduce shrinkage. Cue a bit of reshelving, with the R Tal moved to a side room, and companies like White Wolf and Dreampod 9 in the front.

The reason for the soft core porn art seems pretty obvious: the company thought it would help sell their books, which paints an interesting image of their customer base’s demographics. Sure, the art may potentially alienate a fair swath of the people who see it but that’s really only an issue if you thought the people it puts off were going to buy it in the first place.

1: And made up slang, which happens to be one of those details that grate on me.

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