Popular RPG Games

The most popular RPG games remain games like Dungeons & Dragons, though a search online will show that a game like White Wolf has actually surpassed the D&D line of games in pure numbers of game supplements in the market.

Dungeons & Dragons still rules unchallenged in the fantasy roleplaying category. Any games store you go to will carry as many D&D products as every other fantasy Rpg in the store combined.

Book store chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders are likely to carry D&D almost exclusively, with a few seemingly random other selections. Given the fact that Hasbro Inc. now owns Wizards of the Coast and therefore D&D, it’s no suprise the distribution of the Dungeons & Dragons rpg is #1.

But this is indicative of a market reality, too. D&D is simply the Coca-Cola of the gaming industry: when your product is the generic term for the industry, you know you rule the market.

Despite gamers complaining about the d20 system and D&D in particular, role-players still love buying their dungeon crawls or products from one of Wizards of the Coast’s many fantasy games setting. The art is first rate.

The volumes of materials for Dungeon Masters makes it the easiest to run from a DMs or GMs perspective. Roleplaying purists might view D&D as watered down and hopelessly illogical, but it is the mainstream, for better or worse. Dungeons & Dragons is the McDonalds of the rpg industry: fast food roleplaying.

The release of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons has created the usual controversy, since gamers love to complain about every new version of the game. D&D 4th Edition was designed to appeal to MMORPG online players. Like the MMORPGs, gamers are able to add new powers and effects with each time they level up.

The players are only pitted against monsters within 3 power levels of themselves. While this should have appeal to those who play Internet roleplaying games, many old-timers and purists believe this homogenizes gameplay way too much and makes leveling up rather meaningless.

Whatever the case, you’ll be able to walk into the following stores and find support for the following products.

There have been some famous game settings in the past for D&D, such as Greyhawk, Mystara, Planescape, Spelljammer, Savage Coast and Rokugan. Since the release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, it’s possible Ravenloft and Dragonlance will be moved into the ranks of the unsupported settings, with changes being announced every now and then.

Other popular fantasy roleplaying games over the years have been Runequest, Warhammer, Talislanta and Palladium, along with a huge number of other games. Runequest and its Glorantha setting has been around in one form or another for 30 years and many gamers prefer the mechanics and alternate setting, full of barbarians, familiars and exotic variations of elves, dwarves and trolls to the standard Tolkien-inspired D&D fare.

Talislanta was a game with a heavier emphasis on magic, while the current Palladium RPG game offers powered-up character builds that are meant to be compatible with all Palladium Games products, including their Rifts (watch out for mega-damage) and Heroes Unlimited products.

The Warhammer RPG is a gritty roleplaying game and setting based on a war gaming brand of the same name. In Warhammer, magic is dangerous and combat is particularly lethal, since you roll on a random table to see just how maimed a character gets.

Magic is played similarly, where a failed roll can result in some truly horrible things happening to your mage – or the area around him. Warhammer also has a futuristic version with space marines called Warhammer 40,000, where elves, dwarves and orcs take their wars into outer space.

The Exalted RPG from White Wolf is a fantasy setting which allows players to play demigods, so the roleplayer will be able to play characters as powerful as the old Advanced D&D characters or the later Epic Level D&D options. This means you begin play with characters who are equivalent in power to D&D characters you’ve played for years.

Exalted is a wonderfully imaginative rpg setting, though it uses the White Wolf dice pool mechanic that, in my mind at least, still doesn’t work quite right after 20 years of play-testing. With a few house rules, though, Exalted can be an entertaining game.

As mentioned before, White Wolf Games is the most successful rpg outfit to start in the last 20 years. White Wolf combined modern horror roleplaying with eye-catching art to market themselves to the changing roleplaying public in the 1990s.

While gaming in the 70s and 80s was largely about picking up gold, artifacts and levels in an attempt to powergame and kill as many orcs and dragons as possible, roleplaying in the 1990s (at least for many gamers) began to focus on the narrative. Character building was less about building up stats and equipment and more about telling a good story or developing the character, as one would in a novel or movie.

White Wolf produced a number of different products that were based in its “World of Darkness”: a modern world resembling Earth in the 1990s, but stocked with a secretive underground culture of vampires, werewolves, faeries and mages.

The classic example of White Wolf’s World of Darkness games was “Vampire: The Masquerade”, which was the model for all the others to follow.

In Vampire, the gamers played vampires who were members of a particular clan of the undead. Since it was the Nineties, the characters were full of all manner of angst, yet looked good in their melancholy. Vampire: The Masquerade was a significant part of the pop culture phenomenon of the modern vampire, which still grabs the public interest today (Trublood, Twilight, all that girly stuff). Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascencion and Changeling: The Dreaming were also popular products in the World of Darkness.

Today, most of those games have gone into a second edition, including Vampire (with Vampire: The Embrace). Another White Wolf modern rpg game that you’ll see in stores right now is “Scion”, which is kind of Exalted in the 21st century. In Scion, people play demigods, who are the children of the mythological deities of Earth.

Like the World of Darkness games, other games over the last twenty years have gained followings by highlighting the narrative and given the players a lot of power. Amber Diceless Roleplaying was the first roleplaying game not to use a random element (dice being a huge part of roleplaying generally).

In the Amber RPG, players lived in the Amber Universe from Roger Zelazny’s Corwin novels and later Merlin novels. The diceless aspect not only opened up new possibilities for roleplayers, but it also made Amber Roleplaying accessible to a cult following who can roleplay online via email. (Random dice rollers have made the same possible for d20 roleplaying, too, but D&D online was always a problem from the standpoint of trust.)

The Nobilis rpg borrowed some ideas from Amber, but like the World of Darkness, brought the game into the modern world. In Nobilis, the gaming group plays a collection of godlings, who act as agents in the modern world for a patron god or entity.

Each character is the master of one particular concept, abstraction or type (war, mathematics, flowers, etc) and is the embodiment of that concept. The groups’ various domains make up the porfolio of the god they serve and they act with godlike flair in their rivalries and conflicts. Like Amber, Nobilis is played diceless, and many gamers view Nobilis as one of the most elegant gaming systems ever invented.

These are certainly not the only diceless roleplaying games out there. Active Exploits is an attempt at a generic diceless roleplaying system, and you can download Active Exploits pdfs online from places like DrivebyRpg and RPGNow, which are actually the same company. I own a copy of Active Exploits, but I’ve never played it, so I can’t give a full rundown of their gaming system. Keep your fingers crossed and maybe you’ll see a review on here sometime.

There are many different genres, though. Not everyone makes characters into godlike beings capable of changing the world. Some are average people struggling against forces far beyond their control. Of these, The Call of Cthulhu is the best example.

Call of Cthulhu is based on the Cthulhu Mythos written by H.P. Lovecraft and his admirers. The rpg takes place in the 1920s, and you play a jouralist, professor, detective or dilettante trying to stop cultists from bringing forth the Outer Gods into the world. Knowing you’re likely to fail or go insane in the attempt, you strive anyway against forces you can’t fully understand – or fear to understand.

These days, the rpg market offers a number of variations on this theme. Dread, Ars Magica, Witchcraft and Unseen Armies are indie roleplaying games that involve horror or supernatural elements in their setting, and which have their own followings.

Superhero roleplaying games have never been quite as popular as the fantasy roleplaying examples, but comic book roleplaying has long had a place in the market. Back in the 1980s, games like Champions, Villains & Vigilantes and Superworld were on the market. DC Comics and Marvel Comics have tried multiple times to market roleplaying games based on their superhero universes.

Of these, only Champions has remained a viable rpg option up to 2010. These days, Champions Online is found competing for the superhero MMORPG market against City of Heroes and City of Villains, while the Hero System that Champions uses is in its 6th edition.

Along the way, other companies have tried to market their own superhero rpg. White Wolf tried and failed with the Aberrant RPG, which was a wonderfully fertile superhero gaming world, but failed for reasons I still can’t exactly account for (unless it’s the difficulties of the dice pool system all White Wolf games use; likely not, since that hasn’t hurt sales on so many other products).

Other games that have come and gone were “Brave New World” and “Silver Age Sentinels”. Brave New World was contemporary with Aberrant in the late-1990s, but the game read more like a novel than an attempt to lay out an rpg setting. As for Silver Age Sentinels, the game simply got edged out by another superhero rpg that has gained the most traction of any other superhero game since Champions: Mutants & Masterminds.

Mutants & Masterminds is the most popular superhero rpg game at the moment, mainly because M&M allows customization and variety of power levels, while maintaining a high level of playability. Mutants & Masterminds game designer Steve Kenson, who also worked on Silver Age Sentinels, was asked by Green Ronin Gaming to create a d20 superhero rpg.

He decided to ditch the profession, like most d20 games have. He also did away with hit point, another d20 standard. The first opened the game up to a great deal more flexibility, since players weren’t shoehorned into playing “the detective” or “the martial artist” or “the gadgeteer”, but could really play a Batman-type character who had elements of all three.

The second decision (no hit points) let M&M play more like a comic book and less like a dungeon crawl. Instead of battles of attrition where characters try to whittle down hit points one round after the other, combat became a matter of difficulties classes (called a “DC” in d20 gaming) you tried to hit. If you hit over an opponent’s toughness difficulty class, you did them damage. Hit high enough over that class and you know them out.

Kenson also added in the “hero point”, which you can trace as far back as Warhammer (and possibly further; forgive me if I fail to give credit). The hero point allowed for re-rolls of really bad dice rolls, while allowing a superhero to perform truly heroic feats at certain times through the game session.

Mutants & Masterminds let superhero gamers stage fights that seemed like comic book battles, which explains the popularity. The fact that Green Ronin gives such encouragement to the M&M Superlink companies – third party designers who make products, scenarios and supplements for the original game – doesn’t hurt.

Through it all, Champions continues to maintain a solid base of support. Champion RPG might take a while to make up a character, and might require too much math (not as bad as most critics claim), but the customization allowed for superheroes and supervillains is second to none.

Also, game designing companies have worked to create generic roleplaying systems. The aforementioned Hero System is a good example, with its Star Hero, Fantasy Hero, Modern Hero and so on.

Of course, Steve Jackson’s GURPS system is the best known and most popular. GURPS, or Generic Universal Role-Playing System, created a balanced gaming system that allows you to build characters for any game, any setting or any crazy idea you might have for role-playing. GURPS supplements – and there are dozens of them – discuss particular kinds of roleplaying settings or types: GURPS Magic, GURPS Psionics, GURPS High Tech, GURPS Supers, GURPS Space and so on.

You’ll also find GURPS licensed for particular settings: GURPS Cthulhu, GURPS In Nomine, GURPS Conspiracy X, GURPS Deadlands, GURPS Traveler and really too many to mention. Many people who don’t play GURPS by these excellent supplements for the plot seeds and summaries contained in them.

Most Popular Roleplaying Games

As you can see, there are a lot of popular rpg games out there, besides all the various D&D products. There are several genres I haven’t mentioned that should be covered sometime in greater detail: western rpg games, dark future or dystopian games and space settings, just to name a few. Here are some other popular rpg games, rpg systems or types of roleplaying I wish I had more time to write about, but you can research at greater length yourself.

If you’re interested in reading more about roleplaying tips and rpg movies, you might try reading some of our other sampling of role play articles.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Roleplaying Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Popular RPG Games

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