Joining in on #RPGaDay2015 in the last moments of the project, where people daily cover a specific subject regarding our hobby, I too will share my thoughts on these subjects.

(and use it as an excuse to write in English again, before my writing skills entirely wither away).

Day 23 – Perfect Game for you

Today we are asked about which game is the perfect one for us.

For me there is not a single perfect game, just as there is not the single perfect movie, book, board game or graphic novel. So choosing the easy way out, I am tempted to say, that the perfect game for me is the one, that is tailored specifically to what I am playing.

I don’t want to play with a system, where I have to house rule away flaws in the game engine, and I don’t want to play with a system, where you ignore its presence or play against what the rules are intended to do.

So when I run campaigns, I tailor the system to do, what I want it to do.

When we play dungeon exploration RPGs, we play with my D&D clone Hinterlandet (The Hinterlands), that rewards the players not for killing the monsters but for each room explored, and structures the encounters with monsters, so that the players can more easily choose between negotations, trickery, retreat and combat, and when I ran a Delta Green campaign, we wanted to emphasize how the missions of the agents slowly alienated them from their surroundings by having the system focus on both their family lives and their black op missions for Delta Green.

To me some rule systems makes this easier than others. Shadows of Yesterday was great for running our Transhuman Space campaign, rather than using GURPS, and we mostly just reskinned it. Delta Green Hoarfrost Dragon campaign used a heavily modified Call of Cthulhu and Unknown Armies engine, as the Basic Rulesystem is very easy to work with, and I sometimes default to some very basic d20 engines, that I then start modifying. Polaris, My Life with Master and In a Wicked Age along with Lady Blackbird are also favorites, since they are very focused on telling specific stories.