[School started, so time is short, and this is late.]
While the rules are not necessarily the game (especially since many game systems are used in more than one RPG), I’m gonna say that “best RPG” has been covered in one way or another by days 6, 12, 18, 20, 21, and 25. There’s no way I could narrow it down to just one favorite RPG—even coming up with a top 5 is hard (and last time I tried I gave up once I’d narrowed it down to 8)—and whatever it is it would be one of the games I mentioned on one of those days, and/or repeatedly on several other days. So rather than bore you with the same things over and over, I’m going to interpret this as my favorite game instance (evening/campaign/whatever)—which includes a particular RPG, of course.
There are a lot of possibilities here—I’ve been blessed with lots of great games. There was our “filler” game of Remember Tomorrow from a couple years back, which did an amazing job of giving us a coherent game that consisted of a quartet of individual stories. I had an awesome time playing Heroine at Forge Midwest this year, and my first-ever game of Primetime Adventures was this amazing con game of “a more serious take on Jem, as remade by J.J. Abrams”. And there are many others. So in my usual decisive fashion, I’m going to declare it a 3-way tie.
In general, my favorite games are ones that other people have run—I tend to be the GM, always have been, so any time I get to play is great, but it’s particularly great if the game is great. So I’ll take running a good game over playing a mediocre one, but if everything else is equal, I’d rather be in the player’s seat.
Wildburry Academy
An exclusive private school somewhere in the Romanian mountains, where exceptional teenagers are taught how to play “the great game”. Except it’s not a game any more—the Cold War is over, and the gentlemanly rivalries of the 19th and early 20th centuries are found only in history books. Not quite as dark as reality, but still a world of deception, double-dealing, and uncertainty. We used Spycraft 2.0, and our characters were 15- to 16-year-olds when they first enrolled. We played through their first year, with a fun mix of fake teaching missions, serious espionage missions—and typical high school events, as depicted in any teen romcom. (We don’t take our games overly seriously.) The GM was great, and Spycraft really supports running a game like this, with lots of crunch to differentiate our characters and make tasks genuine challenges. Plus, I got to play Vacile Moşanu, former Transnistrian teen idol with an ego that borders on solipsism, but an actual knack for organizing others and an inexplicable way with people. I got to play the member of the group that everyone loved to hate—the Barney Stinson of our game, complete with pulling off outrageous plans (when the dice favored me).
Higher for Hire
A few years ago I was playing in a group that was playing fairly traditional, long-running campaigns—things like Arcana Unearthed and Reign. I wanted to play some more story-oriented games, so I pulled a small group together of like-minded people, and one of the first games we played was Primetime Adventures (PTA). We followed the suggested setup, meaning that we first settled on a setting & premise, then created characters, then chose characters from among those to be our PCs. I’d heard multiple accounts of starting from children’s shows producing amazing games of PTA, so we started talking about actual shows that we were all familiar with. Turns out there weren’t that many (mostly due to age differences), and then we hit upon TaleSpin. Taking a tried-and-true method to adapt an existing property, we decided to play the next generation. It was almost 20 years after the events of the show, with Molly & Kit all grown up. Baloo and Rebecca had married and retired. Kit had inherited Higher for Hire, and then run it into the ground—like Baloo, he was a good pilot but no businessman. He was living on the couch of his friend Riki Tavi. Meanwhile, Molly had gone off to college and, teaming up with her friend Gosalyn Mallard, become an actual costumed vigilante, bringing her childhood idol Danger Woman to life! What she knew was that it wasn’t all Kit’s fault that Higher for Hire had gone under: the escalating conflict between the air pirates and the vigilantes had made the airways so dangerous that everyone’s insurance rates had gone through the roof. Sher Khan had made sure of this, and then stepped in as all the smaller insurance companies went bankrupt to “magnanimously” buy out Higher for Hire (and any other competitors that didn’t fold first). Don Karnage was now a doddering shell of his former self (though having gained in wisdom what he had lost in debonair), and the air pirates were only still around because it was convenient for Sher Kahn to continue to have them as an excuse for higher shipping rates. We also had fun pulling in other possible characters, beyond who actually appeared on TaleSpin, from related settings.
We decided who our main characters would be and then randomly determined who would play whom (rolled dice? I can’t remember), which left Dan as GM, me as Molly, and Caitlin as Kit. It was absolutely fascinating as the combo of the dice, the characters’ stats, and the situations drove us into all sorts of unexpected territory. I remember distinctly discovering at one point “Molly’s kinda selfish”, and being surprised by this. But, all around, it was an awesome game, and has me ready to return to Primetime Adventures any time I can find an interested group and a few weeks.
Reclaiming Perach
After a couple false starts, I finally got to run a game using The Burning Wheel. We created our own setting, extrapolating from the life paths: a world where the elves had “uplifted” humanity (and, before them, the orcs). Eventually, the humans outgrew their “parents” and war broke out. Humans discovered/invented sorcery and won the war, destroying elven society in the process. Our characters included an elf who feared he might be the last of his people, but the rest were human, remnants of the war. The story was intended to revolve around Anthony de la Bouche attempting to reclaim the throne of Perach from his usurping uncle, but I made the mistake of letting them into the same room with a weapon in the second session. In a deadly and non-narrative system, don’t let the PCs at the main badguy early on, because they will kill him.
As it turned out, this made for a very interesting game: only a select few knew that the uncle was dead, and so it became a game of politics and propaganda while trying to avoid the king’s forces long enough to raise political support for a return. The Burning Wheel system really shone, and made for an awesome game, despite my occasional errors in gauging the effectiveness of enemies. Though my very favorite scene never happened: we were all set for a combined simultaneous duel of wits and duel of sabers between Anthony and the most powerful of his dead uncle’s supporters, Captain Robillard. We’re talking total de Bergerac territory here—and a game system that can actually make both parts equally fun and equally consequential. Then the PCs used a clever combination of facts and carefully fabricated evidence to sway Robillard to their side, thus completely short-circuiting the duel. I was so disappointed. :-( Not that I can actually complain when the PCs are clever and/or non-suicidal—the duel really would’ve been a toss-up, and thus a very risky move on Anthony’s part.
We had a very satisfactory conclusion to Anthony’s storyline, and were just starting to get into the question of whether any elves remained (and they had begun finding evidence of the returning orcs) when the game ended. Had it gone on, consequences would’ve become very interesting: in addition to the orcs no longer held in check by the elves, there were side effects of all the magic, some of it very dark, that had been used to win the war, still lurking about the land. Maybe someday…
Mental Propinquity 