RPGs Day Ten

[james_davis_nicoll]

Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number ten: Chaosium's Worlds of Wonder. The Worlds of Wonder boxset contained the Basic Roleplaying rules (a streamlined Runequest), plus three settings: Super World (A superhero RPG), Future World (a SF RPG), and Magic World (a fantasy RPG). The setting books were by modern standards rather lean (16 pages), so the designers had to be judicious about how to cram enough information in so the result was playable; in Future World, for example, they used interstellar gates that could only link worlds of similar mass and spin, removing the need for ship or detailed world design.

It was a perfectly functional set of rules. Why it didn't become the core of a GURPS-like range of world books I can't say. It didn't, and GURPS took that niche instead.

Comments

[jreynolds197]

Too bad that GURPS came out after your top ten. I played it for a while, and wouldn't mind hearing what you have to say about it.

[(Anonymous)]

One of the biggest problems with the Runequest system was how the interaction between game mechanics and character progression combined to create perverse incentives. "You can only get better at skills you use in combat/under stress" sounds great, but it drove weird behavior if you wanted to get better at things you weren't already good at. And the combo of wanting high POW for magic success/magic resistance, wanting low POW so your POW increase rolls were more likely to succeed, and requiring permanent POW costs for rune magic/items tended to drive the magic system (and presumably any other systems that used POW as a currency). I don't know if that was fixed in Worlds of Wonder.

As for GURPS - well, I did some early playtesting and mechanics work on it, so I'm not impartial, and it certainly had its issues, but I think the key to its popularity was the way it streamlined and generalized the Champions style Disadvantage/Advantage point system.

Riderius

[jbwoodford]

"You can only get better at skills you use in combat/under stress" sounds great, but it drove weird behavior if you wanted to get better at things you weren't already good at.

Switching weapons after each successful hit, so you can get better at more things.

[dragoness_e]

Basic Role-Playing did go on to become the core system of Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG.