Musings on tabletop roleplaying. A mixture of homebrew ideas, observations, and theory discussion; plus occasional reviews, utilities and inspirations. Verbose, amateurish, under-edited, over-written, not especially serious.
I don't own any rare RPGs, only common ones and a load of PDFs (inherently not-rare). By that argument, the answer is either:
Hellcats and Hockeysticks, because the least common RPG must be the rarest; or
one of the ones I'm writing myself, because nobody else owns them. Technically this would be De Jure, the only one that I think is arguably complete, although it's more a hack than a game per se.
For all the wrong reasons, this would be the Deathwatch game where we didn't have any armour or equipment, so ran around bouncing daggers ineffectually off a Tyrannosaurus rex until our Librarian managed to microwave it to death.
I don't think I've played any scary games. A few have had individually tense moments, either because we knew an enemy was somewhere but hadn't found it, or because a combat was going badly. Arthur's AD&D games have had some quite tense, creepy sections involving strange ancient magics, usually coupled with the threat of enemies skulking somewhere nearby.
Apparently some of my games have featured very creepy sections, but then I tend to run either Call of Cthulhu or D&D games with lots of undead, both of which demand a lot of describing creepy things. I have a tic of describing completely harmless things in dire tones and being blandly innocent about dangerous things; I need to watch out for that.
Oh, wow, let me see.
My first instinct is to say AD&D, because while the 2nd edition ruleset is reasonable, the organisation is distinctly sub-par (try finding info on how you use holy water sometime) and some things could really do with being made more consistent. But there's a myriad of retroclones out there and I'm sure one of them does the job, it's just we use the real thing.
Um, I think I'm going to go with either Deathwatch or, bizarrely, Hellcats and Hockeysticks. While it's not necessarily what Fantasy Flight want to do, I personally feel Deathwatch would benefit from an overhaul to bring it in line with more recent games; with cutting out some of the generic 40K RPG stuff and transferring it to an appendix on cross-product gaming; and with a very serious look at balance, specifically all bolt weapons and reconsidering the somewhat all-or-nothing way the psychic phenomena rules work.
Hellcats seemed like a promising game, but felt like it was trying to do too much with one product, covering a wide range of possible genres while simultaneously not feeling very focused. I would like to see a new edition that took a narrower subset of Girls Behaving Badly as its basis and concentrated on doing that effectively, while also refining and improving the skill system, which was counterintuitive.
This is another tricky one, as very often character sheets that look cool are also kind of unwieldy, and I end up tracking down (or making) a more pragmatic version that is more helpful in laying out information or including relevant details. A frequent gripe of mine is when there's no space to list modifiers in modifier-heavy games, so you end up with a final number and no idea how you got there or when it should change.
Another complication is that in a lot of the games I've played, we just used scraps of papar rather than the official character sheets, and often I don't know what the actual character sheet looks like.
I think I might go for Numenera here, for good intentions, although it had its downsides, like being designed for strange American paper. It's pretty. Others are more useful, but you did say "cool".
Pathfinder (which is the improved version of 3rd edition as far as I'm concerned), poor middle-child. Despised by AD&D friends and 4E friends alike, the unfortunate middle child never gets any love.
Complicated is a difficult term to define and there are several ways to interpret this. D&D 3.5 probably has the most complex ruleset in terms of sheer number of bits and pieces. AD&D is the least coherent, because its fairly rules-light system is a set of one-off rules cobbled together in rather arbitrary order, split unhelpfully between different books, and with no attempt at streamlining them into something more unified. FATE isn't an especially intricate system, but I have never managed to get my head round how to combine the narrative unfolding before me, the things I or the players want to try and achieve, and the actual mechanics.
I suppose Deathwatch is another contender here because it has so many bits. Each skill has specific definitions for several ways it can be used and how to do so. Weapons have individual rules and effects. Spells are esoteric magic, so require rules-per-spell. Even the basic starting Space Marine has to bear in mind a couple of dozen special abilities, genetic enhancements and bits of tech that provide modifiers, immunities, rerolls and exceptions. These aren't overwhelming once you're playing, but it is a lot of stuff to bear in mind.
Cool is relative. I think FATE looks pretty nifty in a shiny professional game kind of way, but D&D 3.5 Monster Manual is probably still my favourite here because it has a load of cool illustrations. It's prettier than it is usable, because some of that artwork and font choice rather cramps my reading style. It hasn't yet crept into the full-blown dungeonpunk of 4E, which isn't bad, but isn't my style of choice for fantastical art - I like something with that dash more realism to it.
We're looking at a very limited selection here. I ought to say AD&D 2nd edition because I've actually used that one.
The only licensed RPG I've played is Deathwatch, so yeah.
The majority of RPGs (that I've ever heard of) come fairly explicitly from someone else's idea, whether they get a license, blur the traces, or mash together enough different sources to count as their own thing. A lot of licensed games are TV-based, and not owning a TV, I'm not likely to care about them (this is an accident of life, not a philosophical position). I'm generally more into books than other media, and book-based RPGs are generally either borrowing liberally from several authors to create a new product (either a general one or their own specific creation), using material old enough not to require a license, or adding a licensed skin to a generic system (FATE seems to do this a lot, also GURPS). The first type aren't licensed, and I'm only likely to play the second if I'm into that specific setting, which hasn't yet happened. Call of Cthulhu is out of copyright. So far, I'm the only person paying attention to the genres I'd like to play in.
Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons and Dragons are classics that are flexible enough to keep them fresh, even if I end up drifting from the default settings. I can't imagine not wanting to play either of them. I think the thing is, they're simultaneously specific and generic. You can run one of the actual D&D worlds, or you can use the same ruleset to run a massive variety of fantasy games with different tones, themes and content - even the magic system and metaphysics have alternative rules and are hackable. Exactly which edition would be a subject of, ahem, debate amongst my friends. Call of Cthulhu is again usable with any sort of vaguely weird fiction, and can be set in the past, future or an alt-hist if you prefer with only minimal tweaking. Neither has any very specific rules that the game is built around, so they're forgiving of tinkering, but even so they have their own distinct flavour in the default.
I'd also lay good money on Deathwatch because of my abiding love for the universe, although Games Workshop may have perished and/or decanonised all that I hold dear by that point.
I haven't really played a ton of published scenarios, as we do a lot of semi-improv stuff, and also I hack about any scenarios I personally run unless I'm actually destruct-testing them. I haven't run anything more than once.
I quite enjoyed Wreck Ashore for D&D 3.5 once the players and I had resolved miscommunications (i.e. I'd explained that they were the kind of crown agents who went and dealt with problems, not the kind who sit around at banquets and send for military assistance). That being said, I did substantially rewrite it so the lizardfolk were basically an oppressed minority rather than gullible and vicious lackeys. I kind of want to say A Stony Sleep, but it has some issues at the very start and the very end. Ah, let's go with that anyway.
I like different systems for different things. Call of Cthulhu is pleasantly straightforward (especially for new players) but erratic, and has a very strong argument for being my favourite. I like the speed of AD&D in the hands of an experienced GM, but it's an arbitrary hotpotch. To confuse everyone, I may end up saying Traveller, which I haven't even played. I feel like for the specific genre it's aiming at, which isn't a bildungsroman and doesn't aim for rapid skill increases, the system sounds pretty slick from the extensive podcasts I've heard.
All our games are pretty funny, with the possible exception of Fiasco, but that was mostly because we weren't particularly enjoying it. Our Warhammer 40,000 games are hilarity itself (for me), so I probably have to go for that. Hellcats and Hockeysticks is possibly the only intentionally comic game we've played, and was fairly fun, but I was mostly stressing over attempting to remember the rules.
I suspect the intention here was "funniest game product you've played", but I haven't really played comedy games because we don't seem to own many. Aside from Paranoia (unplayed) or something similar, most games that set out to be funny seem to be storygames, which aren't our thing much.
Ah... I dunno, really. I own everything I genuinely want to own, partly because I'm realistic about the amount of gaming I'll actually do. I already own many more RPGs than I've played or am likely to play, mostly in PDF (bundles, cheap deals, bought to check out some allegedly-interesting facet of a game). I suppose I vaguely like the idea of War of the Ring, but honestly we probably wouldn't play it because it's easier to just play more D&D if we want fantasy, and nobody's so into Tolkein that they'd go wild at the prospect.
Haven't been to a convention. These questions are not as universal as the author hoped, sad to say. That's three in a row I can't really answer.
I'm happy to say I haven't managed either to get my character killed (okay, Neverwinter Nights campaigns notwithstanding, but the engine is brutal) or to kill off any PCs in my own games, so far. The looks of horror on people's faces when I dropped them unconscious were sweet enough nectar for me.
Seriously, I adore my 4E D&D group for how non-mechanically they think about this stuff. It doesn't matter how mechanically difficult it is for a "dying" character to die, it matters that their beloved character is bleeding in an unconscious heap on the floor.
I'm not sure if the intention is "RPG written a long time ago" or "RPG bought early in your gaming career". Mine is fairly short and compact so there's not a huge amount of difference between my early and recent purchases. Oldest in age is, still, AD&D 2nd edition. Earliest bought is 4E D&D, which I still run when those folks want to game.
Either Grunting or Maid. I haven't played either so I can't guarantee their exact weirdness quotient. I would tend towards Maid on the grounds that Grunting is weird because it's doing something very different from a typical RPG, whereas Maid (from the very small amount I've actually got round to looking at) seems to have some of that intangible something that makes you want to edge away from people at parties.
Also, I feel the need to defend owning Maid, but not Grunting, which suggests Maid is weirder. It sounded like it had interesting mechanics, but I heard dubious things about it between buying and reading, so the reading never really happened. I still have a vague sense that if I read it, it might inspire me either with a fun game, an interesting mechanic, or an idea for hacking it into something I would like to play.