These are probably the RPGs I’ve run the most, and written the most material for a campaign for. Which is astounding considering how poor the actual rules are.

Obviously the pull of these games to me was the Marvel license. I’d liked Marvel comics as kid, starting with a Spidey/Ghost Rider UK reprint as a treat as a kid after having to go to London for various tests (the other treat being a Battle Of The Planets transfer kit). Then various second comics picked up in school fairs/jumble sales and the occasional present from my grandmother. Finally there was the UK printing of Secret Wars, Secret Wars II and Spider-Man and ZOIDS.

I kind of forgot about them when I went to secondary school, until WH Smith’s started getting US Marvel comics in. Which coincided with when I got into RPGs. So TSR’s licensed Marvel RPG was a natural draw.

Now the rules were based around this colour coded chart. You rolled percentile dice, the cross referenced the roll on the chart against the value of the statistic you were using. They used this system on various other non-D&D games that TSR released at the time. One of the Gamma World editions used it as did their Conan RPG and Star Frontiers. Possibly the Indiana Jones RPG too. I don’t think Top Secret/SI did, but I could be wrong. I’ll look it up when I get to that one.

Some people liked this system, but I found it a pain. I dislike games with unnecessary work, and cross referencing two numbers on a chart definitely count as too much work. But I still kept hacking away, trying to get a decent campaign going, because I had such Marvel love. And this really was a game for Marvel lovers.

It was essentially OHOTMU the RPG, particularly the Advanced version and it’s supplements. Most of it’s supplements were vast depositories of statistics for Marvel characters both prominent and obscure. And on top of that there were the Gamers Guide To The Marvel Universe books that at the time were arguably better than the information provided by Marvel at the time. At one point I had all but 5 products published in this line (I’ve since disposed of a lot of that material via eBay) and here’s the products I’d recommend if you were interested in playing:

Marvel Advanced Set - The core rule book. The rules aren’t particularly clear and you’ll end up winging a lot of it. Plus there’s not that much scope for character variety.
Ultimate Powers Book - An expanded character creation book. You’ll end up rewriting the character type table, as frankly it’s barking mad, but the range of powers and the rules to use them are expansive.
Realms Of Magic - This was for the Basic set, but the magic rules in the Advanced are, if anything, even worse than the Basic’s. This supplement completely replaces the magic rules and makes them workable.
The MT Modules - This was a 3 part time travel themed campaign by Ray Winninger. A great adventure with a superb meta-gaming climax.
The MX Modules - This was a 4 part campaign based on The Nightmares Of Futures Past story from the X-Men. It’s clever trick is to set the adventure in your hometown. Of course this trick works better when you are in America. I had to pretend Spalding was in Massachusetts when I ran it.
Deluxe City Campaign - This is the only supplement that actually gets around to telling you how to run your own campaign. I think TSR must have thought you were only going to play their published supplements.

Most of these can be downloaded in PDF form for free at MarvelRPG.net

It should be said a lot of my criticisms of the game are in hindsight, back when I started playing I was a lot less critical of game mechanics and more interested in settings. But I do think those flaws held me back in every getting a campaign really off the ground in my first gaming group. I’ll talk about my long-term Marvel campaign when I get around to talking about the SAGA rules Marvel RPG, but here’s some teenage brain spill about the characters we created at secondary school.

AXE-MAN - This was the first character I created using the Basic set. His power was that his hand turned into an Axe. I was 13, this seemed cool to me then. I believe he was a mutant and that his background was that he had been asked to join the X-Men but was thrown out for being too cool.
TWISTED SOULS - This was the superhero team that my players in my first group came up with they were:

MR MYSTERY - a robotic Rorschach clone, with Hank Pym powers
ACE OF SPADES - a mystic swordsman
TWISTER - a mutant with wind based powers
and there was a Captain Marvel-type whose name I forget. The twist was that he was a cat who turned into a human superhero.

THE WRESTLER - a teleporting wrestler
MEK-A-NEK - a blatent copy of the He-Man character
ALIEN SKATER - The HR Giger creation. BUT ON A SKATEBOARD!

As I mentioned before, I got Paranoia free through a White Dwarf subscription as GW got rid of their stock of their UK printings of US games. Also offered was Stormbringer, which a friend got. I think I played this once or twice as a player. There was an adventure called “Madcap Laughs” in White Dwarf that we played through. Eventually through various swaps, it ended up my possession (I think I still have it today).

I’ve neglected to mention so far that this is a RPG based on the Elric novels of Michael Moorcock. And that I’ve never read an Elric novel. I remember borrowing a Corum novel from the library around this time, and not being overly keen. I’ve since come to realise that I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy in the world. But despite my vague ignorance of Moorcock’s work (though I think I’ve read some of his comic work since) and my disposition towards fantasy, I got some decent games out of this. While not being familiar with the source material, the themes appealed to me at the time, having been exposed to them via other creators who had been inspired by Moorcock (mainly Grant Morrison).

And the game mechanic is a nice one. It’s the pared down version of the Runequest rules that were used by Chaosium for various games such as Call of Cthulhu (more on which later), combined with a magic system centred on the summoning of various entities, and the binding of said entities. There’s a scenario in the rule book that would be a key adventure in my second groups’ games, based around a cosmic gambling parlour. I now wonder if my fellow GM in that group, Barry, had taken to heart the bizarre random occurances in said adventure, as the games he’d run for years to follow were heavy with items and situations that created hundreds of unpredictable events. Stuff, like halls of mirrors where each mirror would have a different set of random effects for the person looking in it. He must have spent ages writing up chart after chart of this stuff.

Annoyingly we kind of lost contact with the chap after he said he was moving Cardiff, he then rang me a week later, while I was out, saying he was actually living in Edinburgh. And as he never left me a number, that was the last we heard of him.

This was the wargame we played the most. The key to WH40K success was down to one thing - the box set of 30 plastic Space Marines they released at launch. Back then, for 10 quid you can have enough minatures to play a fun skirmish with. It was cheap, accessible and fun. Much like crack cocaine. A couple of us had boxes of marines, some metal Orks, I had a couple of the plastic Land Raider tank kits, and then we’d pretty much use every other minature we could lay our hands on. This was before Games Workshop turned really money grubbing and officious, and there weren’t “OFFICIAL ARMY LISTS” you had to use. The old Rogue Trader ruleset could pretty much turn any minature into a valid WH40K unit.

When US law required them to remove lead from their minatures and switch to a pricier alloy the writing was on the wall for our love of Games Workshop. Minatures got more and more expensive, the plastic kits included, the shops became the McDonalds of games shops, and the games less and less fun. But I’ll go into how Games Workshop lost their fun, and the evils of company dictated metaplot in later posts.

Paranoia is pretty much the reverse of every other RPG at the time. Whereas they tended to focus on teamwork and rules, Paranoia fosters backstabbing and terrible unfairness. It takes place in a post apocalyptic world (post-Mega Whoops in the games parlance), where surviving humans live in a place called Alpha Complex, governed by The Computer, an over-protective and insane artificial intelligence.

The players play Troubleshooters, agents of The Computer who deal with treason perpetrated by mutants, secret societies and above all, Commies. Because of the threat of these dangerous traitors, The Computer kindly has everyone cloned six times. It turns out though that everybody in Alpha Complex is a mutant and member of a secret society, Troubleshooters included. And so the actual game play tends to merely hang on the thinnest excuses of plot, instead focusing on the players’ attempts to secretly commit treason, while attempting to accuse/incriminate/kill every other player.

For all but one of our gaming group back then, this was the first RPG we’d played. Some might say it’s worst possible game to start with, but I disagree. A couple of us were into drama at school and I think this game appeals more to that sensibility of mine than some of the other early RPGs I played.

Here’s what I love about Paranoia from a purely gaming perspective:

Disrespect.

Paranoia fosters a disrespect in the GM for both rules and plot. The rules in the 2nd Edition are, for the most part, deliciously simple and grossly unfair. Because they are so simple you can freely bend them as you see fit with little complaint.

But it’s the disrespect for plot and narrative that I think is more important. I like playing roleplaying games mainly for character and dialogue. Not only do I think that an overly structured narrative is unnecessary to the enjoyment of a game, I think it is more often than not detrimental to the enjoyment. The great thing about Paranoia is the narrative structure is pretty much the same every adventure, you just have to think of characters to slot into that structure. You don’t even have to worry about how to move from one scene to another - you can just have the nigh omni-present Computer order the characters to do something - even if they don’t you’ll likely have more fun as the players start reporting one another of insubordination.

To talk about RPGs generally for a moment, I tend to “write” my own adventures rather than run pre-written ones. I’ve known folks who are great at running those sort of adventures, but it’s not for me. I find them to be too limiting, requiring too much preparation, and have too many long paragraphs of non-fun descriptions to read. As a player there’s nothing I hate more than having to hear a description of a building, countryside or town that goes on longer than a sentence. My approach is to write out a list of scenes and list things I want to have happened in each scene, then wing it from there. That way you can’t get upset if the players completely ignore that place you spent an hour mapping and writing flowery descriptions for. Also you can easily put in stuff you think up on the spot, or get suggested to you by what the players say or do. I won’t go too much into that now as there are some later games I will talk about that I think support this approach wonderfully.

Back to Paranoia. As much as I like the simplicity of the rules in general, there is one place it gets a bit clunky, and it’s not a place the players ever really see. I’ve a thing about keeping the maths as simple as possible on any given gaming action - and while to the players it seems a straight over or under d20 roll, in the case of damage the GM then has to do deletions and chart cross referencing, and that slows the pace a little in what is supposed to be a zippy game. The latest edition Paranoia XP, as good as it is, annoyingly makes it even more complicated. It’s still real simple compared to some games, but not as polished as I’d like.

The creators of Paranoia were Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber and Eric Goldberg, with Ken Rolston and Paul Murphy additionally getting credit on the 2nd Edition. XP was by Allen Varney, Aaron Allston, Paul Baldowski, Beth Fischi, Dan Curtis Johnson and Greg Costikyan. There was the jokingly named “Fifth Edition” in 1995, but by that time the game had become a shadow of it’s former self. The original game was very much a product of the Reagan-era and can be seen as part of the post-apocalypse pop culture that threaded through the Eighties. To have it return in 2004 made perfect sense as a reaction to the US politics of today.

Of the original developers, Costikyan is probably the most noticeable today for his various essays/rants on game design/games industry and the founding of Manifesto Games. Rolston, who was one of my favourite games writers, recently retired and is probably more well known today for his work on Morrowind rather his tabletop games work.