Day 3 of #RPGaDay2024 and the organizers what a breakdown of the numbers, "Most Played RPG"
Most folks have a rough estimate of what they play the most, I've kept a running tally for the past 35 years, since I started playing in 1989.
The baseball card stat memorizer in me started keeping track of not only when I played a particular RPG, Miniatures, or Board Game, but I also documented when I ran "GM'ed" a game.
A third of a lifetime ago, I had a hard drive failure and lost what had turned into a simple spreadsheet, but not only have I save my new list of gameplay since 2009, I've rebuilt the original, documenting all the games and specific years I probably played certain games, give or take a year.
At the end of the day, it's only kept to satisfy my own peculiarities... and for #RPGaDay purposes.
Gamma World: If we continue playing consistently for another year, we'll get close to surpassing Hackmaster. These numbers include games we played back in 1992-93.
Call of Cthulhu: Lots of one-shots, an abortive attempts at Masks of Nylarathotep as a player (we finished New York), while finally achieving a proud feather in my cap: Completing Masks as a Keeper, with a significant lead-up of almost twenty sessions before the name Jackson Elias even came up. We had an interesting body count, and fitting to me tracking game sessions, we tracked that two initial characters from the first Masks session survived to the end... one from the 2nd ever session of the campaign!
I've been posting these on a local RPG group on Facebook and was simultaneously surprised and not all that surprised that EVERYONE (but me) had Dungeons & Dragons as their most played game of all time!?
ReplyDeleteFor sure, I started with D&D... but pretty much as soon as I was aware that there WERE other games, I started playing THOSE!
Not that I'm saying there's anything at all wrong with D&D, it's just been eye-opening to see how much they still dominate the industry.
The thing is, We played it on different games in high school. We played a ton of GURPS, It was always two or three sessions adventures and we just go back to D&D.
DeleteI would’ve buried bodies for a chance or recon, or tmnt or Star frontiers
Ah yeah, that makes sense..
DeleteWe did a LOT of 2-3 session games... Or sometimes only got around to making characters... but there wasn't something we went BACK to, it was always moving on to the NEXT THING!!! We might revisit things we'd tried in the past, from time to time, but there was no one staple game to which we returned. I guess part of the reason was the guys I met and played with in high school weren't die-hard fantasy fans (i mean, every one of them had ready Lord of the Rings and plenty of other fantasy stuff... but I think they were more interested in science fiction). By the time I met others whose favourite thing was fantasy, they were HUGE into Role-Master and later GURPS.
My son and his groups seem to have your problem. He keeps trying to get them to try new systems - and they humour him and let him run short campaigns. But at the end they're like "Yeah, that was fun... Can we go back to D&D now...?" I think he gets a little frustrated at times!
Also, I also track all games on BGG/RPGgeek... I wish I'd started sooner. I do love statistics... I've scoured old day planner books and found some dates indicating games played... but I was never all that good at keeping those up-to-date, or using them at all in earlier years...
ReplyDeleteI am in awe of your record-keeping - and there was a little stab in my soul when I read that you'd LOST the original files!?
My gaming record survived multiple notebooks in high school, a Brother Word processor,w/ Amber screen, Have a sketchy 90s college computer network. But it couldn’t survive a bad hard drive 13-year-old computer that originally started windows Me.
DeleteI put my history degree to use research a lot reference a lot of gaming catalogs. I still have. I think my new master file just had the years blocked off and I played certain games but not the quantity. It's the only true evidence how much !@#$^#$@ Magic I played from 1993-2000.
After RPGaday, The list is due it's own post.