Graph Paper Games

Hmmmm....So I went to RPG Geek to see what the most collectible RPG's out there are.  Turns out I have several of them. Including #1, the 7th Sea Player's Guide #8 Central Casting: Heroes of Legend And #13, the aforementioned first printing of Deities & Demigods Interestingly enough, one book not on list is one that I sold for literally hundreds of dollars (I had two, so I could afford to part with one), Central Casting: Dungeons . That last one I'm particularly fond of, because I still use it to make up the occasional random fantasy dungeon.

So, so many to choose from.... Okay, so for a while a friend of mine ran two Champions campaigns in tandem: Vanguard and Vanguard Europe (this was during the Giffen era of Justice League, not to mention the Iron Age of comics).  I ran Vanguard Europe, while playing a character in Vanguard (the ever-lovin' Amazing Man).  Vanguard's GM ran a character in Vanguard Europe, a Batman/Moon Knight sort of guy who happened to be team leader (and damn it all, the PC's name escapes me). Anyways, Vanguard Europe was a pretty powerful group.  There was Shocker, the electricity manipulating telepath; super-ninja guy whose coolest aspect was that he took the perk Direction Sense just so he could always leap up and have the moon behind him; there was also the female flying brick too.  Plus Moon Knight, whatever his name was. One session this villain shows up with his super-powered female sidekick and he's packing a ton of gadgets that are home-grown to defeat the villains. ...

I think horror is a really, really difficult element to pull off in RPG's, and frankly it isn't a theme I particularly enjoy for the most part.  I play a lot of heroic style games, and I'm sure there have been plenty of tense moments where a lot hinged on a single die roll. But, I think I'll share instead a sort of scary but mostly funny tale.  After graduating college I moved away for several years, but returned briefly to live in the same state where I attended college for about six months, and got back together with two of my old gaming group to play, of all things, Rifts .  I ran the session and things were going pretty well when suddenly one of the players cracked a joke and I chuckled while at the same time eating a nacho chip. I began choking, coughed, turned red  and then, after what seemed like an eternity for me but was probably less than three seconds, proceeded to vomit right into the snack bowl.  There was stunned silence for a moment and then o...

A great game concept with a complicated ruleset.  Don't know this one?  Here's the synopsis. The Seven Worlds are the good guys, noble individuals dedicated to higher ideals.  They fought a war against the Starguild, a bunch of tyrannical jerks, a lose.  Small clusters of soldiers from the Seven Worlds place themselves in suspended animation in hope of coming back 150 years in the future to try to re-launch a war against what they hope will be a diminished Starguild.  The PC's are a group of these cryogenically-frozen soldiers, who have a strong knight/samurai feel to them, only with powered armor. Only here's the kicker.  The planet, Rhand, where they are sleeping was actually conquered by an heretofore unknown alien race called the Spectrals, who infect the population with a virus that makes most humans hyper-violent sociopaths.  So instead of waking up in some decaying Starguild society, they wake up in full blown Mad Max-ville.  Now the...

So, I can't find the example of the one I like the most.  A GM had created pre-generated PC's, but instead of a character sheet game them a photoshopped picture of what is on their desk: miscellaneous objects, papers, books, etc.  You could look at the contents of the desktop and figure out what kind of person it was.  What was really clever was s/he had worked the stats into the texts of things like take-out restaurant menus or playbills from shows.  It must have taken a ton of work, but was really effective.

So, a small technical issue: do you mean "nobody in my gaming group," or "nobody I know," because I'm pretty sure Blacksteel and Barking Alien would play Champions with me, even though no one in my gaming group in Kansas would. So a game I like that few other people do.  I love Cosmic Enforcers , but I think most people don't even know that game. It's got a fun "Legion of Superheroes" thing with futuristic alien superheroes battling crime and galaxy-threatening alien conquerors.  Rules are sketchy and unbalanced, if that's a problem for you.  I actually corresponded with one of the creators of the game, who basically told me he wouldn't communicate in any manner regarding the game because the publishers had hosed him, which is too bad.