My 7 Most GM'd RPGs (Meme Response)

Here they are, visually presented in roughly chronological per my introduction to them ...

When most of my 8th-grade friends where knee-deep in the hardbacks, I was running adventures where all the alignments consisted of one word instead of 9 different 2-word combinations. But it wasn't long before I was really running sort of a house version (before I knew what that meant) combining the two games.

In retrospect, what I was running at first was probably closer to the LBB rules. Eventually, the BX boxes got shelved, and the hardbacks became the go-to's.

I know that to some purists, Car Wars isn't technically an RPG (not the earliest versions of it, anyway), so you can't really GM it. I started with the little black case (one of the favorite items of all time in my game collection), but graduated to the deluxe edition-- mostly because it took all the extra arms and armor from all the ADQs and compiled it into a master edition. Even with character rules, I can't recall EVER using them. This is really more of me "starting" games with it, rather than GM'ing in the purest sense of the term.

I still love the uniquely old-school approach of V&V. You might base your character's normal persona on your own (in real life!), but you roll for everything else. None of this "choose your powers" stuff. No, sir.

We were lucky enough to have a game club in high school, which meant a built-in group of guys to game with. Once a week after school, twice a week during activity period, and occasionally before school in the library for a year or two. We played A LOT of V&V.

I think early on we played so much V&V that by the time Champions 3e came out, we were ready for a different game--one where we BUILT our characters. That, and Champions felt like it had more "power" than V&V (which felt a little constrained).

I'm not sure how we degraded to MSH from Champions and V&V, but I will say this... a really streamlined system like the original MSH made it easy to take the rules and adapt it to other settings (but I guess that's the nature of a comics-based RPG). I ran some non-super-hero sci-fi stuff using MSH for quite a while. It was just so... simple. It really has a nice pulp feel when you play with limited power levels! And it's a no-brainer to run. If I wasn't so focused on my own Starmasters stuff right now, I'd love to start up some new pulp sci-fi gaming with this.

I think I've run this game more than anybody I've ever met in my life. I haven't played it in a while, but I swear back in the day I ran campaigns with this shit! I kid you not. At its core, it's sort of a simplified version of The Fantasy Trip, and could probably be retro-cloned pretty easily into a quick and dirty fantasy RPG. Replace shticks with spells, and... voila!