I owe this question to +Ted Collins : "Which game have you owned and most wanted to play, but never did?"
For me, the answer is easy enough: Call of Cthulhu. The reasons, however, are multiple.
My groups always wanted to play in a campaign style game - CoC always seemed most suited to one shots and short story arcs.
PCs are pretty much domed from the start. I don't mind that kind of play, but my High School and College groups wanted to kick ass or die trying. CoC kinda kills you if you try - always.
I never felt confident in my ability to pull off the feeling of dread and horror that CoC requires, and no one else was game to try.
So, here I am, nearly 30 years later, and I still haven't played a session. Got as far as making characters - twice even!
So, "Which game have you owned and most wanted to play, but never did?"
Easy. Traveller.
ReplyDeleteI have always had a copy since the blue "Traveller Book" and I ran it once or twice (no idea what I was doing), made some characters, but never played myself.
Funny.. I've really been considering running a CoC campaign.. I thought it would be fun to do it via email since it kind of lends itself to that kind of play. The one I owned but never played was Shadowrun.. The one I didn't own but always wanted to play back in the day was Twilight 2000.
ReplyDeleteTake it from me, Dave - CoC by e-mail is a blast. I've been doing it since 2010. You should certainly give it a go.
DeleteThanx! I was wondering if somebody else had tried it..
DeleteMost of the Palladium games, I did play Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles for a while with the group, but we never broke ground with some of the other Palladium products we possessed. They made some great books and a few races to poach for other games.
ReplyDeleteChivalry and Sorcery. I never got the chance to run it or play it, but spent many hours using the kingdom setup rules placing chapels and manor houses on maps...
ReplyDeleteIt will come as no surprise, given my most recent post on my own blog, that HârnMaster is the one I most want to play, but never have had the chance.
ReplyDeleteI think the deadliness of Call of Cthulhu is overstated. I've only lost two characters since I first played it in 1996 or thereabouts, and one of those was last year.
ReplyDeleteI've run games using TSR's SAGA system, but never Dragonlance itself. I'd like to give it a try one day. Otherwise, I would love to play or run Lacuna Part 1: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City but an opportunity has never come up.
Gangbusters.
ReplyDeleteI love the Lakefront City setting, and I really like the genre. I could never find anyone else interested in the game, however.
Traveller - I even got the Mongoose version of the rules and several supplements, but just never get much beyond fantasy gaming.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with Call of Cthulhu is that it loses its edge if players KNOW it's gonna be Cthulhu. The best Cthulhu is unanticipated Cthulhu.
ReplyDeleteIt's also classic when the group is certain it's Cthulhu - and it's not, it's a mischievous leprechaun. The denouement is everything you want in terms of seeing players faces - or so our GM told us when he did it to us. For myself the game unplayed is Warhammer FRP - never had a group to play it with.
DeleteLejendary Adventure
ReplyDeleteX-Plorers.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Mouse Guard.
Skyrealms of Jorune. Great idea & presentation but too left field for any group of players I've ever associated with.
ReplyDeleteI think I've gotten at least one session out of all of my games... but I'm pretty sure Twilight 2000 never hit the table again once we'd made our characters.
ReplyDelete(And if you need to unload you Jorune material, talk to me!)
"Dresden"
ReplyDeleteHonestly I don't have this problem. Some games I own I've only played once, but at least I've given them a try. My problem is rather the huge amount of adventures/campaign settings/whatnot that I haven't used.
ReplyDeleteI think the only RPG game that I owned but never got a chance to actually play is James Bond 007 by Victory Games. I spent many an hour making characters, adventures and reading about cool stuff in the Q-Manual, but no one ever wanted to give it shot.
ReplyDeleteHave to say GAMMA WORLD. Own the old modules for 1st /2nd edition, all the 3rd and most of the 4th edition stuff. (However, it seems to me that we will never get back that sense of laughing in the face of potential nuclear apocalypse that I remember from the early 1980's, that seemed to permeate my impression of GW back then.)
ReplyDeleteGamma World, own all of the 1st edtion books but never have played the game.....sigh.
ReplyDeleteMage: The Ascension was one that I really wanted to attempt back in the first part of my gaming career, but absolutely nobody I knew wanted to play it. It was around the time I was transitioning from high school to college, and I was a big follower of various philosophies, and (as many have done before me) I was breaking out of my old boundaries and letting my mind open to the possibilities of life. Mage pretty much was an encapsulated philosophy course, or at least that's how I percieved it. What better game for a college kid than one where you play characters that can change the world with sheer willpower?
ReplyDeleteProbably the Phase World setting for Rifts. Somehow, the kitchen sink approach of Rifts and the huge space opera setting of Phase World go together like warm brownies and milk for me.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, besides the fact that my current game group views the Palladium ruleset as a mess (for which I can't fault them), they also fail to see the virtues of a setting where techno-magical battleships and their psionically-enhanced starfighters battle legions of space wasps for control of ancient artifacts of unfathomable power.
Twilight 2000 for me. Had it since it was new. I could probably run it for my current group, but I really want to play it.
ReplyDeletePendragon.
ReplyDeleteSavage Worlds.
ReplyDeleteBurning Wheel.
ReplyDeleteFTL: 2448.
ReplyDeleteAlmost GM'd it at one point, but the group never got together.
Pendragon. Have a ton of the books, but never played it.
ReplyDeleteWe have the same problem. It seems to me it might work well as a play by post.
DeleteFading Suns! Without a doubt.
ReplyDeleteRed Dwarf RPG. I have had it for about a year to year and a half and have been dying to try it out
ReplyDelete