Non-D&D ‘March Madness’ Blogging Challenge Day 1

Welcome to the Non-D&D ‘March Madness’ Blogging Challenge!

If you want to see all the questions, they are HERE.

If you want to see the first kick ass participant who finished ALL in one fell sweep, his or her blog is HERE.

Other participants are as follows (contact me if you want your blog listed):

Mesmerized by Sirens

Barking Alien

The Savage Afterworld

What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse

The Other Side

The RPG Corner 

Crit This 

Timnits & Trolls (The one who has gone ahead and finished the challenge already! BRAVO!) 

Aieee! Run From Kelvin's Brainsplurge 

RPGames.be 

Back to the Keep 

Cross Planes

I myself will be knocking off a question a day, starting with this one:

1 What was the first roleplaying game other than D&D you played? Was it before or after you had played D&D?

A: It was GURPS, probably 3^rd edition if not 2^nd (early 1990s). We started a GURPS Fantasy campaign, and later played some Space after years of D&D.

After the straightjacket nature of D&D’s class system, the open skill lists of GURPS and its open character generation were almost too much. We spent hours or even days making a character, so the GM (DM no longer!) could not kill with impunity. Even though the GM had lured us with the promise of having the ability to make ANY character we wanted, we soon realized with a 100 point limit our characters were just as weak as any OD&D newb.

Sad trumpet sound.

I suppose the greatest thing we took away was that one game system could indeed be used to run any type of game, from Conan to Star Trek. BRP has since expanded in this direction while GURPS has contracted to a mostly online PDF version. The OSR has also clued in, with retroclones based on the D&D engine for sci fi (Terminal Space, X-plorers), superheroes (Hideouts & Hoodlums, Mystery Men!), oriental adventure (Flying Swordsmen, Ruins & Ronin), and even westerns (Blood & Bullets, Go For Your Gun).

Although the concept of a generic or universal system may be old hat (see Unisystem, FATE, FUDGE, Cortex, etc ad nauseum), it was GURPS that did it first and, as many blogs contend, the best.

And GURPS sourcebooks were always the highest quality, regardless of what system you preferred.