List of my favorite role-playing game rule systems

Gene Michael Stover (gene@acm.org)

created Friday, 2022 December 30
updated Sunday, 2023 February 5

original at https://cybertiggyr.com/nlsnv3.html

This is vain & pointless

Yes, it is.

The list

• d100
• Tunnels & Trolls
• Shadowrun
• GURPS
• Star Frontiers

d100

I'm not sure this system really exists. If not, then it describes a bunch of systems that rely on d100. These include Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, TSR's Star Frontiers, & a bunch of light-weight, independently published systems I've stumbled on.

What I like about d100 systems is that I think in percent. (I suspect most people do.) It's easy to think about a chance of success. It's easy for an adventure creator who doesn't know all the groups who'll play his adventure, to state chances of success.

Update 2023 February 5: I've learned that there is a system called “d100”. I guess it was for the Stormbringer roll-playing system, which I haven't played but I remember advertised in Dragon magazine in the 1980s. It required you to calculate a target number, roll your percentile dice, add them to your skill & modifiers... a lot like Cyberpunk 2020 except with percentile dice instead of 10-sided dice. I dislike it.

Star Frontiers

I guess Wizards of the Coast is reviving Star Frontiers in the here & now, the 2020s. I've played it occasionally since TSR released it in the 1980s. I mostly play it solo.

I like the urban parts of the setting, though they were sadly emphasized in only a couple SF adventures published in the 1980s. I didn't care so much for exploring uninhabited wasteland planets.

I like how SF uses d100. It has a skill system kind of like GURPS's (predates GURPS, so it'd be more appropriate to say that GURPS uses a skill system kind of like SF's). Opposite of GURPS's skill system, SF's is too coarse, but I prefer that over too fine.

Tunnels & Trolls

Simple & light-weight. Light-hearted. Great for soloing. And the Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls book (which is a joke on Advanced D&D, I hope you noticed) has a fleshed-out world.

Though I'd like to roll more than 2d6 for skill checks, they get an A for trying something different. And you get to roll fist-fulls of d6 during combat, so that's cool.

Shadowrun

You get to roll shoeboxes of d6! And it's urban! I love the setting of Shadowrun.

I usually dislike the magic, but we usually just ignore that when we create our own adventures. Sometimes we leave magic to the baddies only, allowing the player characters to rationalize it as unknown, experimental technology.

GURPS

I reluctantly like GURPS. What I like about it is that, as advertised, you can do practically any genre with this single role-playing system. You don't need to learn a new system for each genre.

As with Shadowrun and T&T, if I can't have percentile dice, I want 6-sided dice.

Most importantly, it's what my friends prefer. I use the system & occasionally grumble about it, but the rules work & we have a good time. This supersedes my gripes about GURPS.

I have a lengthier list of gripes, including...

• My biggest gripe about GURPS is that is loses the ambiance of many settings. In my experience, GURPS works great with westerns, monster hunters, & 1940s-ish pulp, but it can lose much of the feeling you expect from cyberpunk & dungeoneering.
• The probability granularity between consecutive levels in the middle of the 3..18 scale is too coarse. At skill level 10, a character has a 50 percent chance of success. At skill level 11, more than a 60 percent chance. The game can't represent, say, a 52 or 55 percent chance of success.
• There aren't enough skill levels. With an 3..18 scale, & with players wanting to level up a skill or 2 after every adventure, it doesn't take long before every character has a few skills over 20. It's kind of a waste because that's off the scale for the basic rule of rolling your skill or lower. I know it's not just my group because the GURPS rules have combat moves such as deceptive attack which allow a character to divert some skill points into lowering their opponent's chance to dodge or defent.
• The genre & settings books for GURPS are more like construction kits than full settings. If you want to create your own world, that's great, but some of us just want a good world to play in. (We created our own worlds when we were teens, 40 years ago.) I'd like to see fleshed-out settings for GURPS, whether created by Steve Jackson or by 3rd party writers.
• The lists of advantages, disadvantages, & skills are too lengthy; the advantages, disadvantages, & skills are too fine-grained.

In the end, GURPS is my friends's favorite system, & it works without me learning a new set of rules for each genre, so it's one of my favorites. But barely.

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