In this episode, we pick the five RPGs every role player should have on his or her shelf, including which edition to have. These aren’t our five favourite games or the five most popular games of all time. Nope. These are five games whose mere possession will contribute to your overall gaming experience.
These are the criteria we used. Play along at home.
Innovative
Impact
Representative of a specific type of a game
Widespread
Paid us to mention them (Kidding. No company took us up on our offer.)
Ethan C. says:
Both TORG and Monster Hearts over Call of Cthulhu? Huh. I would put that one right up there with D&D and Vampire. It was extremely innovative at the time (the idea of both playing normal humans, emulating a specific literary style, and the Sanity mechanic), high impact (there are lots of horror games directly inspired by it), representative of a game type (horror gaming, and also percentile dice as a mechanic), and widespread (you’ll see a table of it at most Cons). Plus it’s one of the few RPGs that have stayed in print throughout tons of editions since the 1980’s, without ever radically changing its rules.
Justin Schmid says:
My top 5 must-have RPGs isn’t that dissimilar, they would be:
D&D (any edition, though I prefer 5th and 1st)
GURPS (for a point-spend game you could play anything with)
Savage Worlds (the easiest universal game you could play anything with)
Fate Accelerated (cheap and simple entry to the world of Fate-type games)
Dungeon World (most accessible Apocalypse World engine game, easily hackable to play different genres)
This could keep you busy no matter what you wanted to play after you were introduced to RPGs though D&D.