The First Five RPGs I Played

I was thinking this could be a fun exercise for anyone who has made a hobby of RPG's, recent or not. For me it's not recent but it's good to revisit the classics occasionally, right? All the talk of new editions of things has me looking back a bit so here we go:

The book cover, not the box, because we used the book a whole lot more than the box

1. I started with Holmes Basic D&D, and over the next year or three moved into AD&D and Moldvay Basic and then Expert. I'm lumping them all into one item because that's how we played it. This is where it all started with hand-drawn character sheets on notebook paper and maps on graph paper with boardgame pawns or coins on pieces of paper to show locations for some fights. So many things we consider "essential" now from miniatures and Chessex mats to laptops, tablets, and the internet were either not a factor back then or didn't exist! Sometimes it's good to remember you don't actually need most of this stuff - just a game and some friends ... and probably some dice.
   
   
   

   

   Such a distinctive look with these

   
   
2. The next RPG I became aware of, bought, and ran was Traveller, the old 3-books-in-a-box edition. I had a friend at school that talked about it constantly an so I started looking at it in the local mall hobby shop and and ended up getting it. It's hard to express how much this expanded my horizons with a very different method of character generation, a skill system, no levels, ship construction, solar system generation ... it was incredibly eye-opening coming to it with D&D being my only other experience.
   
   
   

   

   Maybe the first big Elmore cover?

   
   
3. Following closely on my Traveller expansion was Star Frontiers which was a pretty big deal at the time but has mostly vanished into the mists of history these days. Sure, I still have my stuff and there are fans out there even now, but I don't think a lot of players coming in from the 90's on even know it existed. It had a very different approach from Traveller with a sort-of class system but still using skills but they were percentiles not a straight number like Traveller ... it was sci-fi but a different flavor of sci-fi. 
• The coolest thing about it was probably the poster maps and counters that came in the box that were used for a lot of other games for years in lieu of miniatures - including Traveller.
• The worst thing about it was the complete lack of spaceship rules. That was a terrible decision. I'm sure they thought it made sense at the time but I think it really hurt the game in the long run.
  
  

  

  I still love this cover.

  
  
4. The fourth RPG for me was Champions - I loved Champions. So eye-opening in so many ways. My first experience with point-build systems. My first superhero game. My first time to realize that we could do anything with these rules. I suspect a lot of us independently discovered the concept of running a fantasy game using Champions, running a  science fiction game using it, and as Champions II and Champions III came out it only made that more possible with rules for creating vehicles and then creating bases. It was the anything system! And it still is ...
   
   
   

   

   Loved that 1st edition ruined city cover art but this is where I started

   
   
5. The fifth RPG I dove into was Gamma World. My first post-apocalyptic setting with a system that was very much like D&D but with random powers and weird races mixed in. Growing up as cold war kids this kind of game really spoke to some of us, as did the realization that here was a game where you could have superpowers and modern to futuristic weapons with no alignment and no rules or responsibilities to limit how your character could act. Would you play a hero, even without rules? Would you be a warlord or a despot or a bandit? Or would you just be a simple man trying to make your way in the universe? Here the rules weren't really the big deal - it was the setting and all of the possibilities it enabled. 
• Also one of the few RPGs where I have used nuclear weapons, definitely the first of those, and that's something that sticks with you.

As a follow-on to these I believe my 6th would have been Boot Hill, rules-wise more of a miniatures game than what we would call an RPG today but we played it like an RPG for sure. The highest and best use of this game was to send your characters into a D&D module using the rules in the DMG and we loved that.

I mean it's not a Larry Elmore painting but that's still a pretty evocative cover

My 7th would have been the Star Trek RPG from FASA. So much here to love when the Trek universe was much smaller and less complicated and the only real setting switch was "are we using the animated series stuff?" which the FASA trek game did by default. Character generation was a little like Traveler but used percentiles for skills and the system used action points to resolve combat actions. Plus there was so much lore in one place! A super cool ship combat system with charts to run the main kinds of ships we knew about at that time! Deckplans! There was so much good stuff in this game! I'm sure to modern eyes it would look dated and limiting but it was just amazing and it was very playable. 

Iconic. What more needed to be said here?

On a final note I see posts online - a lot of them lately - where people are opining on the golden age of RPG's we live in and what an exciting time it is and then go on to cite six different flavors of D&D that either just came out or are about o come out this year and just wax on about how great it is. I don't want to rain on someone's joy and sure, I like my D&D variants too, but ... come on. Those 7 games I noted above all came out roughly 77-83 and they could not be more different and they were all popular at the time to some degree and there were a bunch of other games at the time that I was aware of but not playing. Out of those 7 three of them have dropped out pretty completely (Star Frontiers, Gamma World, and Boot Hill - notably all old TSR games) but the other 4 still have a current version in print today. Sure, some are very different, particularly the Trek game, but you could pick up an old campaign without a ton of effort for any of those. 

I also wonder, given some of the things I see (like the above) do people think that D&D and RPGs are a new thing? Do they get how long we've been doing this or how many different games have been published in all kinds of genres over the decades? Rifts, Shadowrun, and Vampire brought in the new wave of the 90's and those games were all wildly innovative on some level and decidedly not D&D and they're all over 30 years old at this point. For the early 2000's we had Savage Worlds and Cortex and FATE - what's the 2020 version of all of these? Maybe the Apocalypse World-based games? I get that your first game outside of D&D can be a huge experience especially given how dominant 5th Edition has been but a lot of the new doesn't really seem all that new if you've been exploring this hobby for a while. What's the big eye-opener for the new generation of players?

The 90's gave us this gem too - let's not forget that.

All of these games had a heavy influence on me very early on so I wanted to put them out there and acknowledge them and anyone who worked on them - you've given me a lifetime of entertainment with these. Thank you.

Enough rambling here. We can start looking forward again next time.