#RPGaDay: Day 18

18. Which RPG have you played the most in your life?

Answer: Today's question is an easy one because my first RPG is also the one I played the most. Although I owned Moldvay's Basic very briefly first, Frank Mentzer's Basic red box Dungeons & Dragons was the first RPG I ever actually played. I got it in 1985 and it - along with its subsequent editions (BECMI or Rules Cyclopedia) - was my primary game for the next 4-5 years. Mentzer's Basic set was maybe the best set of rules to introduce role-playing to a new player. It walked you through a mock game to illustrate the different mechanics with examples of play. I heavily supplemented this version of Dungeons & Dragons with 1st edition AD&D books as flavor (deities, subclasses, settings, legendary monsters, modules). I felt guilty at the time for not playing it straight, although I realize now that there were a lot of other people who played it this way too.

As a rules set taken as whole, including all five sets (Basic-Expert-Companion-Masters-Immortal), this system actually developed into something incredibly complex. There are a lot of people who still love this game and the particular flavor it had. Looking back, I have plenty of nostalgia for it and its Elmore-Easley artwork, but there are plenty of reasons I wouldn't want to play it now. Demihumans having race-as-class with level limits, the incredible amount of options and rules at higher level, and the theme-park/kitchen-sink fantasy setting are all things I prefer not to deal with anymore. The last of these reasons is a big part of why I don't want to play the current edition of D&D. The current edition presumes a campaign setting where all fantasy tropes are possible and available which makes for a very complex over-stuffed milieu. It's a setting where magic is common place (almost a professional career track), cities are advanced and cosmopolitan enough to facilitate steam-punk adventures where desired, where monsters coexist in an almost political dimension, and humanoids have more a feeling of ugly neighbors with bad manners rather than real monsters. There's very little mystery or superstition of the real medieval setting which is really more interesting to me.

So even though I've moved on, this is the game that is still my reference point for what role-playing is or what I want it to be.