My first love was AD&D, and I still have fond memories of the first edition. When the system switched to 2nd edition etc., I lost interest.

I did'nt play it for long, but "Mutant Chronicles" provided entertainment on many a Saturday evening.

Mage, Vampire, and Werewolf. Very paradigm heavy; playing crossover games was a nightmare. But fun, at least until they took a nose dive off the revulsion tree and hit every branch coming down. As with AD&D, I lost interest when the began new editions for those games.

In all honesty, the best game I've seen to date is Shadowrun. It's got the tech, magic, everything. And I really appreciate the amount of work that went in to creating an interesting "world", populated with figures you just want to see more of. The highly entertaining shadow chatter in various sourcebooks is what hooked me.

AD&D split off from D&D before 2ed came out, several years before in fact. I've got a shelf full of books that say Advanced Dungeons and Dragons that go back to 1980 (Deities and Demigods, mines the rerelease after the Lovecraft estate sued to get the Cthulhu Mythos taken out) and earlier (too lazy to go looking for my PHB, DMG, Monster Manuals I & II, Dungeoneers Survival Guide, Wilderness Survival Guide, Oriental Adventures et al). Most of the rules introduced in those books became 2ed (proficiencies, specialization, and so on), but they were two seperate editions (2ed came out in '89ish, give or take). There were several different releases of the D&D set (white box, brown box, a different brown box that came out later, red and blue box), but I can't keep them straight.

AD&D and 2ed AD&D were pretty much the same system. 2ed cleaned up a lot of 1ed, but that was kind of like building a house out of toothpicks and bubblegum (and undetonated explosives), spackling over it, and calling the the Tak Mahal. Which is not to say we didn't have fun playing it, although the fun was split pretty evenly between hanging out with friends, deliberately pissing your friends off, and gleefully finding undetonated explosives-- particularly load-bearing undetonated explosives (so in that respect refreshingly little has changed).

Anyway, good times. I've enjoyed D&D (all the various incarnations), and I've enjoyed hating D&D, I've had some really great games of Vampire and Werewolf (although almost all of those were mortals games that had nothing to do with Vampires and Werewolves, at least on the surface), and I've played a lot of games one or two times.

But Shadowrun has been my favorite since I started playing SR2.

I'd forgoten about that. I even have some of those old AD&D books myself, but since they work perfect with 2nd edition I'd compleatly forgoten that they where still technically 1st edition.

I've been playing RPGs forever, way back to the original D&D Basic box. Other than Shadowrun, which is by far my favorite, I really love Deadlands. Others that stand out, a little lower on the scale are the Vampire games and Rolemaster (but that might have been the atmosphere of the game itself, as I ran an epic game with 16 Players!!! ), and maybe even Dream Park if I had gotten a chance to play it more.

My favorite RPG ever in terms of highest ratio of time invested:fun is this game some swedish guy knocked up called syndicate that had like, some rules that where really guidelines, and a resolution mechanic but basically the DM had to fill in the huge gaps and that was good, and free. The best bit about it actually was that character generation was fast, but detailed, so while the resolution mechanic was less in depth than FUDGE, the DM had a really good idea of what capability was supposed to be like so could fill gaps with efficiency.

I played alot of AD&D, and it suffered from the 'I have rules but they are really some guidelines' except it didn't actually tell you that and really wasn't very good. Played a fair bit though, and it was funny, mostly because of aforementioned friends factor.

I liked 3rd more, and while the shiny has rubbed off, its still not that bad. Mostly. If you make sure people don't play monks. And fighters. And anything else with the suck. Whatever else you say about it its still better than AD&D.

SR4 is great.

Those are the only systems I've liked. I've played a few more, WFRP, WWs stuff, Savage worlds, GURPs and found them annoying and medicore. Actually only WFRP was medicore. The rest sucked.

I really haven't played any bad games. I really haven't played all that many games. The ones that hold a special place in my heart are Cyberpunk:2020 and Twilight 2000. These were one of the few games that were translated into finnish, and, as a kid, were therefore the only ones we could play.
Good memories.

There was a finnish translation of Shadowrun, second edition I think, that we used to rent from the library, but somehow never got aroung to play. But Shadowrun was kinda like the holy grail for my group, we used to talk how cool it would be to play it. Then when I got older I finally bought the BBB of third edition. And that was that... I don't play anymore because of the lack of players, but I probably wouldn't bother to play any other game anymore. So yes, Shadowrun it is.

Shadowrun is far and away, hands down my favorite. I enjoyed some aspects of exalted, but never got that into it. Enjoyed WW for the fact it has vampires, werewolves AND cyberware (although your character can only have one of 3). Enjoyed Firefly's setting, but not its mechanics. Enjoyed D&D in that I have friends who play it, but would be just as happy playing just about any other system with them. I am writing my own system, which will hopefully be my new favorite, but for the time being it's Shadowrun, no question.

Best RPGs that I have played are AD&D 2nd, Shadowrun, and Call of Cthulhu (5th ed I think; the Chaosium one not the d20 crapfest).

Gygax era 1st edition SR FTW, with explicit references to Conan in it!

I really liked running D&D and AD&D (heck my license plate had DM AD&D for many years ). I played OD&D and ran Basic and AD&D. I picked up many 2E books but really only incorporated the new stuff I liked into my game.

But then two games came out at about the same time that were the first to pull me away from running AD&D. Paranoia and Shadowrun.

What got me interested in gaming again was when I dropped by a hobby shop a little over a year ago and found they were a real hobby shop and not an arts&crafts hobby shop. RC cars and planes, model railroads, Warhammer, and three big shelves of gaming books. A big red book was my first table top RPGaming purchase sine 1994.

Paranoia XP.

I unpacked my gaming boxes looking for my other Paranoia books and opened a box filled with Shadowrun books (1st and 2nd edition). Those were taken out and put on a shelf of their own. I remembered running Shadowrun and how much I enjoyed it (even if my group wasn't quite so entranced )

So for one off grand fun: Paranoia.

For all other RPGing: Shadowrun.

http://shadowrun.us/games/Dscn8145.jpg
http://shadowrun.us/games/Dscn8146.jpg



Carl