Start to Finish

I adore roleplaying. I have not had the opportunity to play in as many games as I have wanted, because if I had I would in a game right now, rolling a die with my heart in my throat and a character sheet in my other hand, incomplete, for the next game I would be playing. I also own a lot of RPG sourcebooks. Possibly... too many? It will definitely be too many when I have to put them in a box and move them. 


Not pictured: The special Numenera box, a box of RPG books my friend Nate gave me instead of throwing away, probably more books hiding somewhere.

I thought I'd make a list of RPG settings I've had the opportunity to either play or read, and I will do so chronologically in the order in which I played them, because that's difficult. I will also write a bunch of text to go with each one because I do not respect your time.

Vampire: The Masquerade
When: High school
Play, Run, Read: All three! 
Pros: Vampires, masquerades, frilly coats, 'miserable pile of secrets' references
Cons: no one has any idea how combat works, Ravnos perhaps not the most respectful thing ever
Lasting Quote: "I don't see that you CAN'T turn into a crossbow with Vicissitude 5, but you're going to have to spend at least two Willpower."

I have no idea what the actual, intended tone of Vampire is. I don't think the intended tone is one of rollicking cross-country adventure with a hillbilly Gangrel and a slightly overweight Disciple of Set, and I don't think it includes a flamboyant Toreador with maxed out Presence named Hi-Fi Superstar who just wants to be a glam rocker, and it probably doesn't include turning into a crossbow, but we certainly didn't mind. But I want to talk about the Storyteller system, and how much I love it, and how we'll see that same idea reflected again later on in my gaming life.

The Storyteller system, as I understand it, centers around Attribute + Skill.
"I want to be the master of unlocking and unlock this door!"
"Okay, roll your Dexterity dice and your Subterfuge dice."
"Success!"
"A very large man inside stands up, alarmed at your entrance. 'What are you doing here?' he shouts, hand going to his hip."
"Oh, crap."
"Is that what you say?"
"No! Um... 'Sir, I'm here with the exterminators about your bloodfly infestation!'"
"Okay, since that is most certainly a lie, you'll need to roll Wits plus Subterfuge."
"Why not Charisma?"
"Because you're clearly thinking on the fly. You did not rehearse this story ahead of time."
"That's fair."
"Also, that's from Dishonored."
"...that's also fair."

I never had any trouble thinking of what kind of roll to give my players, because it all followed that logical pattern. There are nine attributes, and I will try to remember them from memory. Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Perception, Manipulation, Appearance, Wits, Intelligence, Charisma. I bet I'm right! And then there are a bunch of skills after that, stuff like Academics, Drive, Firearms, Subterfuge, Streetwise, and Void Travel. One of those might be a skill that I made up.

We played Vampire as goofy fun, with a focus on cinematic combat and flashy showdowns, though at the time we didn't use those words. But since this was the first game I ever played, it really informed how I would come to see roleplaying in the following years.

This is the only game I have ever LARPed. I was very bad at rock-paper-scissors, but very good at running past the police office and declaring that gargoyles had descended upon us from the heavens. 

Kult
When: Also high school
Play, Run, Read: Played
Pros: Horror! Unspeakable atrocities! A good reason to have Nine Inch Nails or Tool on in the background.
Cons: the exact thing parents thought D&D was about during the Satanic panic
Lasting Quote: "I'm spending my action sobbing behind that overturned table." "Understood."

My friend Billy ran this in an upstairs bedroom with eight other people crowded around the table in the summer, in a house without air conditioning. That doesn't really factor in, here, but it's worth mentioning. Kult has its origins somewhere outside of the US, and I don't know where, and my memory of it was that it was legitimately unsettling in a lot of ways. Lots of demons-are-real-and-they-are-in-your-bathroom, and most of those demons are the sort of thing you can't fight, a la Call of Cthulhu. Billy was on a mailing list of people who liked this game, and in recapping his stories to them, he got a little flack for letting us, the players, have access to weapons like firearms, because that could lessen the terror and make the demons seem like Diablo demons, and not the aforementioned bathroom terrors. He replied, proudly, that we all fled from the room willingly without even trying to fight. He was a very good GM. We played a published scenario, and I think it lasted for four or five sessions.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
When: Also high school
Play, Run, Read: Read
Pros: All the cultural cachet of the Satanic Panic, none of the satanism!
Cons: Scientists still struggle to calculate THAC0 past the 11th level
Lasting Quote: "You must gather your party before venturing forth."

I have never played AD&D in a tabletop setting. I never got into Dungeons & Dragons early on! Ours was a Storyteller game setting, so I never experienced the joy of beholders and balors, the rejected name for D&D. I did read a few sourcebooks, borrowed from friends, and I think I flipped through a monster manual or two. My primary experience with AD&D came from the Baldur's Gate CRPG games, from which I remember nothing about the mechanics but everything about the banter and the story. I played as a kensai with a rapier wit to go with his rapier, fell madly in love with Nalia, had a mad fling with Haer'Dalis, became very invested in getting a keep, and then never played Throne of Bhaal because the Nalia Romance mod had no content for that expansion and therefore I didn't care. Sorry, Interplay folks! I'm sure you worked very hard.

Planescape
When: 1999.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: I bought an art book of the artist who did Planescape.
Cons: No one ever wanted to play in a game with me.
Lasting Quote: "Updated my journal."

Planescape Torment is REALLY GOOD and I like to call people berks. I also like that the Lady of Pain didn't have stats because eff anyone trying to mess with her. 

Mage: The Ascension
When: Also high school
Play, Run, Read: Played, run, and read
Pros: All of the beautiful Storyteller stuff from Vampire, none of the overwrought Vampire angst
Cons: I have no idea how you put a Verbena and a Virtual Adept in the same game
Lasting Quote: "I'm going to roll my Intelligence plus Instruction and teach you a lesson!"

I think Mage is my favorite game system. Coming to Mage from the Vancian spell system in D&D RPGs, where you have Magic Missile and Shield and you know what they do and that's all they have, was enlightening. Mage has that beautiful Storyteller system, but then what it does with magic is unreal. Let's see what Matt remembers from a big purple book he read in 1998!

There are nine spheres in Mage, ranging from Correspondence for anything involving space to Time for anything involving Time. Matter, Mind, Life, Entropy?, most of these make some sense as far as overall concepts go. Prime is the one that doesn't make immediate sense, but it's about the things that make magic MAGIC. And the whole system made itself so intuitive and creative when you started mixing spheres. Telepathy for a small group over a wide range, for a heist or something? Correspondence plus Mind -- levels of those dependent on how far you're going. Spend Quintessence, whatever THAT is, to boost spells to make them stronger or last longer. But bending reality like this can be a problem -- reality's only going to bend so far until it snaps back to correct itself. Thus, Paradox, an affliction that hits magi hard for twisting reality to suit their own needs. Since the Mage stuff has to exist in our world, in modern day, this explains why people aren't throwing fireballs. But instead of throwing a fireball, what if you use your magic to induce that generator to explode, as if it were just overloaded from too much power draw? Yeah, that makes more sense... and the world will more easily allow it.

I played in a Mage game where I played Chris Brucato, a Cultist of Ecstasy who lived for the thrill of impossible feats of agility and derring-do... which is why he worked as a sharpshooter and rodeo clown in one of the Dakotas. While I did build him with max-level combat stuff, Dexterity 5/Firearms 5, he so rarely shot at people that it became a running gag. Need someone to pop a quarter into a soda machine from 600 feet? Chris Brucato. Throughout the entire game, I never missed one of those rolls, and I kept trying to make it more challenging for myself each time. That game featured Lucius, a mage from a colony on Io who ended up on Earth in a mishap, and Lucius had no concept for what OUR reality was.  Our GM kept track of Lucius's Paradox throughout the game, deciding that at a certain number, Lucius would just explode. At the end of the game, he shared that Lucius came three Paradox points short.

Mage is great. I'd play it right now. RIGHT. NOW. I used to make characters for literally no reason. Let's play Mage. You and me. Right now.

Call of Cthulhu
When: Also high school! I played a LOT of games in high school.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: Horror! Unspeakable atrocities! Like a tenth of the racism!
Cons: The drawing of Yog-Shoggoth is really silly.
Lasting Quote: "You have skill points in cigarette smoking?" "It's a really elaborate lighting process."

I played in exactly one session of one Call of Cthulhu game and remember next to nothing about it. I do own the blue Chaosium CoC book, and it has something in the back that I absolutely adore, and that is a list of occult, criminal, and otherwise notable events, by year, for over a hundred years. I don't know if these are all real! I don't know if someone of them are just made up, but some of them are things that happened. They can be delightfully creepy, too! Here's what happened in 1955, to pick a year at random:


Wraith: The Oblivion
When: Also high school! I played a LOT of games in high school.
Play, Run, Read: Played.
Pros: Do you believe in life after love? Wait. I mean death. I don't think Cher is a Wraith.
Cons: If Cher is a Wraith, that farewell tour is never going to end.
Lasting Quote: "(just a car ride in silence)"

Nathan's idea was a good one! Taylor and I would play ourselves, except we would play ourselves as wraiths! Spectres of the past, tied to the living world by our fetters, unable to move on until we put matters to rest. Wraith probably has entire systems and worlds and cities and stuff, but we did not see it, because Nathan did his job entirely too well. He started when we were living, and we played through our own deaths, a car accident on a rain-slick street.

...except we had a fake-out or two during the living part, which gave us a reason to really not want to die, so when we DID die, Taylor and I took off at a dead (har) sprint in the opposite direction of Nathan's plot, trying to find a way to return to life so everyone wouldn't be sad. The car ride back from his place, normally a time of chatter and laughter, instead had Taylor and I just sit there in the car, silently, tentatively, and being downright timid about intersections. Unfortunately, Nathan was too good at his job for this to work. We never played Wraith again, which certainly isn't fair to Wraith, and we never played ourselves again, which was probably for the best.

Hunter: The Reckoning
When: Also high school! I played a LOT of games in high school.
Play, Run, Read: Read, might have run?
Pros: Turns out in a World of Darkness full of vampires, werewolves, changelings, wraiths, mummies, demons, orpheii, and all the things that aren't player characters, you can still fit in like six normal humans.
Cons: As the least powerful force in this entire world... nope, I can't think of any. This game is rad.
Lasting Quote: "I'm seriously not sure if I ever ran this!"

I LOVE HUNTER. So every other WoD setting that I've seen or vaguely heard of centers around keeping this mad occult world in the shadows of the regular one, so as not to freak out the norms or whatever. Hunter is what happens when that fails. Hunter is what happens when someone sees the true face of fear, and instead of running or freaking out, refuses to close her eyes and instead takes up arms against those forces. Hunters may only have one or two powers alongside their ingenuity and grit, and these may be impossible odds, but never tell me the odds. Hunter is like Dynasty Warriors if you're playing one mook against a thousand Zhao Yuns, but you still have a chance.

I have the main setting and the player's guide, and I honestly think I ran a game in this, however briefly, but I don't remember anything else. If I didn't, it is a huge regret. Hunter is so good!

Dungeons & Dragons: 3rd Edition
When: Early 2000s.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: THAC0's gone!
Cons: In the grim dark future of adventuring, there is only war.
Lasting Quote: "He ran into an accident. *drops a spiked flail on the table* This is Accident."

Ah, D&D. The 800-pound bugbear in the room. I have spent a lot of time playing you, and I don't think I actually like you at all. Let's unpack this, eh?

I've owned a lot of D&D books, and I've played in a few D&D campaigns. And the d20 system ended up being the core building block of something that dominated my life for nearly fifteen years! In the same way that you shouldn't pay too much attention to a negative Steam review of a game from a guy who played it for 2000 hours, some of these problems are only going to come into play from me having spent so much time with it. With that in mind, let's dig into my three primary complaints.

1) D&D is a setting built to simulate combat first and nothing else after. Dungeons & Dragons sprang out of wargaming, and I don't know enough about the history to know if that's why it is covered in statistics, modifiers, penalties, and movement rules, but it makes sense to me. Dungeons & Dragons has probably 150 pages devoted to how best to murder a dragon, with attributes, weapons, armor, feats, spells, magic items, and level advancement, and it has like four skills for interacting with other humans, and only one of those doesn't revolve around lying or menacing. One of those skills, Diplomacy, can't figure out if it's the most potent mind control possible, or just a thing to move an NPC's attitude toward you around on a slider, like that Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Speechcraft game where you make faces at an NPC like you're trying to make your baby nephew burst out laughing.

2) D&D is about random generation of events over procedural generation of events. That is a very poorly-constructed sentence and doesn't quite sum up what I mean, but here goes. D&D, and the d20 system at large, presents a very wide range of rolls. Every attack and skill check is made with a d20, which means that your modifier has a tremendous range attached to it. Setting aside that you have a five percent chance of instantly failing and a five percent change of instantly succeeding, your given rolls could have wild variance, and that wide variance largely cannot be overcome. It's like -- I'm really having trouble describing this!

Okay, here's an example. There's another game on this list that changes the way the d20 system does hit points. Take the Ranger class, which has a d8 for HP. Every level, you roll a d8 and add that to your HP. Oh, you rolled a 2. That sucks. Oh, next level you rolled a 1. That sucks. Oh, next level you rolled a 3. Bummer! You're level four and you have 14 HP. A solid hit with an axe will still kill you. Your wizard friend with the +1 Con modifier rolled nothing but 3s on his HP rolls, so he's got 17 hit points, and he also shoots fire from his hands and can lob ice bullets at people. Have fun! 

But this other class changes that d8 hit die to a d4+4 hit die. So your range isn't 1-8 new HP, it's 5-8 HP. It's lowering that variance. Stretch that over 1d20, where you've got just as much of a shot of rolling a 1 as you do a 20, and there's nothing stopping you from rolling under a 10 all night. Twenty point of variation on every roll that matters is way too much, and does a lot to ignore player strategy, planning, and preparation. Especially because within that variation, you have...

3) D&D has overwhelmingly harsh pass/fail mechanics. So! This is it. This is your showdown. You stand opposite the mighty warlord who's been in your base, killing your mans. You've studied for this. You've planned for this. You've researched his people, you've met with his family, you've communed with his gods, you have the words ready that will stop this senseless bloodshed. You parley. You say your piece. He hesitates. The DM has you roll your Diplomacy. You roll a 14. You needed a 15. 

Had you rolled one more, you would have succeeded, and you would have held him as he sobbed, as he broke down, the weight of unreasonable expectations bursting forth from his chest. Things wouldn't have been okay -- things are never just simply okay -- but you could have moved on, together, with hopes of building a better future, a future that doesn't end in a tattered flag being raised on the tip of a broken spear.

"That's a fail. He bellows a battle-cry. Roll initiative!"

D&D hinges everything on a single die roll. You hit or you miss. You pass or you fail. It goes exactly as you wanted or it goes exactly how you couldn't bear for it to go. You lined up the perfect shot, and you missed, for no reason. He didn't dodge, he didn't summon up another power, you just fucked it, mate. I hope you weren't invested in doing well or anything. Oh, you built your character for that? You had as many ancillary bonuses as you could have gotten? You had the high ground, Anakin? Don't roll a 2 next time. 

Oh, right, there isn't a next time. 

I think the designers knew this was bullshit somewhere when they were making the game, because a bunch of skills have "if you fail by 5 or more" attached to them, like you're bad but you're not shit. And those are things like Climb, Swim, and other physical ones where if you have to make that roll, you're trying to defy death and you have some severe penalties for missing. But with those, you can just keep rolling, right? Just keep doing it. Do it more. Climb again in a minute. Swing again in a minute. But for all those skills, where you're bluffing, you're talking, you're scheming, you're intimidating, where you only get one shot, oh, you just missed your one shot, you blow. Back to reality! And roll initiative.

d20 Modern
When: 2002ish.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read, run.
Pros: Like D&D, but in modern day!
Cons: Like D&D, but in modern day!
Lasting Quote: nothing worth mentioning, honestly.

The only thing I remember from d20 Modern was how it handled Wealth, which I think no one but me liked. Instead of tracking individual money, it assigned everything a value from like 1-30. Characters had a Wealth Level. Let's say mine is 8. At 8, I can buy anything 5 and under without adjusting my wealth, because it's just money I have -- it doesn't really hit me. But going higher than that, like a 6 or a 7, means that I'm having to either liquidate assets or make major changes to my standard of living to afford it, so my Wealth Level drops a point to a 7. And I think that's really clever. Like, I can buy some stuff in the Steam sale, maybe that's a 4 and I'm at Wealth 7. But if I suddenly had to go buy a new car, that's going to drop my Wealth a level because then I have to deal with car payments and a down payment and all that, so my Wealth is a 6. Then that Steam sale hits and I've got to decide if I can really cut myself short again, because now that 4 is a lot compared to where I was before. See? Clever! Under this system, avocado toast is clearly a 27.

Iron Kingdoms
When: I think like 2003.
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: It's got Monte Cook's name on it! 
Cons: I think every gaming book released from 2003-2012 had Monte Cook's name on it.
Lasting Quote: "Oh, this book."

This has no magic and is the book that has the d4+4 hit dice. It also had a neat idea for giving martial classes techniques and the like, with each of them having their own resources that generated when they did rad stuff, like Aim tokens for archers, Block tokens for guys in heavy armor, and I don't remember any of the others. It seems like it could be a really neat low-fantasy combat-heavy thing, if that's ever a thing I was interested in. It seems fine.

Eberron
When: 2004ish.
Play, Run, Read: Played, read.
Pros: My friend made a shit warforged named Botch and he was immediately the best Eberron character of all time.
Cons: A bunch of people with no joy in their hearts hated the setting for being interesting.
Lasting Quote: "Surrender or die! That's pretty much how it's going to be!"

Eberron did a lot of really neat stuff, like taking D&D and wedging it into a steampunk hole with airships, robots, and lightning trains. The lightning rail is maybe my most favorite thing to come out of a D&D setting that isn't Sigil. Eberron is the last setting where I was a player for more than one session at a time, and I had a lot of fun, even if both scenarios ended pretty rough for us as players. In the GM's defense, Nathan and I are very hard to run games for, because we are weird and creative and will come up with our own ways of solving problems that center around stealing as many horses as possible and also having pet dinosaurs.

It's still D&D, though.

World of Warcraft: The RPG
When: I think around when the game came out, so probably 1870.
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: They made the Paladin Seals a gameplay mechanic!
Cons: Maybe they shouldn't have!
Lasting Quote: "BRANN BRONZEBEARD IS IN IRONFORGE I'm gonna see if he'll sign my tabard."

It's fine? It's probably fine. I think it was d20 based, as you probably were too in the mid-2000s. It had two big exploration books, though, done in the voice of Dwarven Explorer Brann Bronzebeard, who is great. Lore books! I love lore books. It was also fun to read the one of those that came out BEFORE World of Warcraft and how I could predict what would happen in later expansions to the MMO, back before I realized that the MMO's idea of storytelling was "Remember this beloved character from Warcraft III? They're back! And evil, so you'll need to kill them." Brann's the best! NOTE: I have not played WoW since Brann was added so I hope he's remained good and fun. Also Jaina Proudmoore is the best and I'm really unhappy with how they've treated her but it's best not to care about Warcraft lore.

Pathfinder
When: The last decade or so
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: Just like the Dungeons & Dragons you loved, and not like an MMO grafted onto a character sheet!
Cons: Paizo's website is really, really bad.
Lasting Quote: "One of the things I really like about Pathfinder is how it better represents women YES I HAVE SEEN SEONI'S APPEARANCE THANK YOU."

I really like Pathfinder! NEXT

Legend of the Five Rings
When: you're not getting out of this one that easily

Oh all right. Pathfinder!

Pathfinder is D&D for people who didn't like the direction D&D went in 4th Edition. I am one of them. And I really like Pathfinder! Does it fix all of D&D's problems? Probably not, because that seems like an impossible task. But it probably tried really hard, and it's got heart, and creativity, and fun. 

I love Golarion. I love the Inner Sea. The first Pathfinder book I got was the Inner Sea World Guide, and I spent fifty dollars on that at a Barnes & Noble, and I read it cover to cover. It's a huge hardcover book with four pages per country in this huge world, and it's just full of lore. It's full of adventures. There aren't any stat blocks. There aren't any huge lists of magic items or monsters. There are a few things in the back, but that is a book that wants to show off a world full of so many different countries, and so many different types of game. Do you want to explore crashed alien spaceships? Do you want to rage against the dying of the Holy Light? Do you want to climb ziggurats? Do you want to steel yourself against terrible winds? Do you want to be a pirate? Do you want to serve as guards for a nomadic tribe of merchants? Do you want to have high-wire kung fu fights? You can do that! It's all in this book! And this book is full of IDEAS. 

Pathfinder does something that I forgot D&D could do, and that's bring back the beauty and the wonder. It's great.

The Adventure Card Game's also good! Pathfinder! It's nice. 

Legend of the Five Rings
When: The last five years
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod
Cons: ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod
Lasting Quote: "ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod"

I have never wanted so badly to play a game and tell them I love everything that they're doing. I already have a thing about Japanese history in that I think it's rad and fell in love with the Meiji Restoration era thanks to dating simulator Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom, and the Sengoku Jidai era is fascinating, and this covers all kinds of stuff and also mixes in Japanese myth like Okami which I ALSO love. The artwork is beautiful, the characterization fascinating, the respectful approach of another culture is great, and the system I adore.

L5R uses a dice pool system similar to Vampire in that you're rolling dice equal to an Attribute and Skill, but it's the Roll-and-Keep system, where you roll X dice and keep Y. I don't remember what dictates everything there. But you roll 7, keep 2, or 7k2. So you roll 9, 7, 6, 6, 4, 3, 2, 2. Keep 9 and 7, 16. You rolled a 16! But if you roll a 10 that die EXPLODES and you get to KEEP rolling it and add those totals and if it rolls another 10 it KEEPS EXPLODING like you're Rico in Just Cause 3 and everything's coming up Chaos. And that mitigates so much of the stupid randomness, you know? 2k2 and 7k2 -- both people have a chance to do well, but the samurai with more dice is going to do better because she gets to roll MULTIPLE dice and keep the BEST. THIS IS NOT HARD. I love it. I love it I love it I love it. 

And the books! The BOOKS. My word, I should just have hearts in my eyes. L5R has my two favorite gaming books ever. Imperial Histories  and Imperial Histories 2. These books cover multiple eras in the world of Rokugan, with breakdowns of what happened, who the important players were, what each of the many clans were doing during that time, and then seeds them with adventuring ideas, including points where you could pivot from the expected histories. And THEN there are what-if scenarios, like what if Fu Leng actually won, what if Togashi became the first emperor, what if the Meiji Restoration were happening and rails were being laid across Rokugan, what if the isolationist tendency was broken down, what if they all went to SPACE. It's just so creative and so lovely, and I love everything about it.

And it's coming back! Fantasy Flight Games picked up the L5R license and the card game is returning this fall, and I am in day one and probably going to make videos about it and write about it and buy expensive binders and then realize I'm collecting two living card games oh god. But the RPG could also return! Isn't THAT exciting?

Isn't it?

Star Wars: Age of Rebellion
When: Right after I fell in love with Oscar Isaac
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: You can hear the music all the time in your head!
Cons: scruffy nerfherders
Lasting Quote: "How are there only six pages for planets?!"

I don't know if it's exciting.

I picked this up because I like Star Wars and I like RPGs, and on my first read I liked it a lot! Custom dice! But wait, that's my first steer back out of this. Custom dice? Why? And the answer is simple -- it's that it's more money. FFG make a lot of games with custom dice and tokens and things, and I like a lot of their games! I'm heavily bought into Lord of the Rings LCG and X-Wing and Netrunner. But I don't want every game I get to have its own built-in restrictions to how I play it. And how would I adapt this to play online, which is kind of how my life seems to work anymore? But should custom dice throw me out of a game? I mean, sure, everyone's got their own things. This doesn't have to be mine. What DID knock me out of this, though?

The talent trees. Each class has its own progression trees, following these spec-like unlock paths. And when I first saw this, I honestly thought it was really cool! It's like the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X! Hooray! But there's a reason that works well in a video game and not in a tabletop RPG, and that's because it restricts your options. Every fighter is going to be one of these few types, strictly defined. It didn't feel customizable, not how I want, and it felt pigeonholing. 

Custom dice, preset character paths -- this is all from one and a half reads of a book. I could very well be wrong! But it kept that setting and system from singing to me, and that bums me out. And I've never played it! I could be one hundred percent wrong. But I hope that L5R remains its own thing.

Numenera
When: 2013ish?
Play, Run, Read: Read.
Pros: Hey it's Monte Cook again! It's UNCOMMONLY beautiful, and uncommonly weird.
Cons: ...which makes it so hard to get a finger on what it is.
Lasting Quote: "That is a really beautiful box for a game you're never going to run." "I know!"

I haven't played it! It's so weird! It's so weird that I can't figure out WHAT it is, where to start, or how I'd run a game in the setting. But boy, it's pretty, and it's so much fun to read! It's a very simple and fascinating system, too, even if Effort's a bit confusing. But I'm into the GM Intrusion ideas, and would love to play in this. I don't know if I'd want to run -- I don't think I understand it enough. I have the big collector's box, which is probably the nicest gaming-related thing that I own. Shame that Torment game left me ice cold.

The One Ring
When: 2015
Play, Run, Read: Read, but only barely.
Pros: I like Lord of the Rings!
Cons: So why haven't I read this book?
Lasting Quote: "That still only counts as one!"

Yeah, I haven't read this. I really like Tolkien's Middle Earth! I bought this two years ago with birthday money! The hell's wrong with me? I think I got so deep into Lord of the Rings Online that I built this up into something it probably can't be. I should read it.

Exalted
When: wait
Play, Run, Read: how did this get here
Pros: what even is this
Cons: let me go see
Lasting Quote: well this might be neat!

Seriously, I don't know what Exalted is or why I own a book. Well, I DIDN'T, but there's a Half-Price Books sticker on the front, so clearly I got it because it looked interesting. It does look interesting! I should read it.

I'm sure I've missed something somewhere. But that's a thing about games and games systems! Soon, I'll talk about creating a Frankenstein's monster of my own game system, and what I'd like to do if I ever ran a game again.