Monday, August 31, 2015

Games We Only Played a Few Times in High School

The computer hacker of the fantasy-future...looks like a member of Flock of Seagulls

Shadowrun - I think we only played this once. Our adventure was just a trip to the corner convenience store; while we were there some thugs tried to rob it and we started shooting at them. This game seemed really complex to us at the time. Too complex to play a second time, in fact.


Curiously, there were no rules for depilatories or prices for teddies in the rulebook
Cyberpunk 2020 - I think we may have played this twice. During the first mission one of our characters died; the character's player was pretty salty about this, so his next character had Robocop-style armor to be as invulnerable as possible. In the second mission a grenade rolled under his feet and his armor let him survive the blast, so...mission accomplished?


Ugh, that cover gives me a headache
Street Fighter - All I remember about this one is that it was way less fun than actually playing Street Fighter II at the arcade.


Okay, maybe it's just because the previous Street Fighter cover is so crap but this still looks compelling to me
Stormbringer - I know it's old school to believe that balance doesn't matter, but there is something janked-up when your starting character might be a leprous beggar and your pal's character is an assassin-sorcerer who owns a demon blade. Anyway, I ran this one and I remember us having a good time with it. We did part of the Rogue Mistress campaign (I don't think we finished it), which was a total railroad but no one cried about that in high school and we had fun.


Remember when having an understated cover was a bold design choice?
Vampire: The Masquerade - Given my love of Gothic nonsense, you might assume I played the hell out of this, but we only played it twice. We could not figure out what adventures modern vampires would really get up to. This wasn't helped by the schizophrenic nature of the game: the fluff was all about angst, intrigue, and "the monster within," but the system was pure Goth Superheroes.


Why are they fighting on clouds again?
1e AD&D - my only experience playing 1e AD&D was a short-lived Oriental Adventures campaign that derailed due to the silly names we gave our characters. I think our party included characters named Godzilla and Ninja Gaiden, which annoyed the otaku-in-training DM. Otherwise, we just ran 1e adventures with 2e, like the young heathens we were.



DC Heroes  - I didn't understand the system at all, but I think we punched some villains or threw cars at them. My lack of knowledge of the DC universe probably didn't help me get into this one. 



Paranoia - We were too young or too immature for this one at the time. The punchline of the adventure we played was that a giant bug was demanding Proust from troubleshooters who didn't know what a Proust was; the real punchline is that it was being played by teenagers who had also never heard of Proust.