D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge -- My first non-D&D RPG

D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge --

The first non-D&D RPG I played was RIFTS.  It is a venerable system that I hardly need to elaborate on.  Most RPG fans have at least heard of it and it is well known enough that even non-RPG players have run across it.  Kevin Siembieda is the main guy behind it all, though he has had a whose who of sci-fi/fantasy artists do work for him and many other designers have worked with him.  But it is sort of a one man show from what I understand.

Anyway none of that had anything to do with why I played RIFTs.  It was actually pretty late in my RPG career before I departed from D&D.  After I had returned to RPGs as an adult I was fortunate to have a really stable group that played a weekly game for about two years.  After that game finally ran its course, we were up for a change.  So the DM suggested he run a RIFTs game.  He was rightfully concerned about the really gigantic amount of material available and restricted us to the collation stuff.  He also had a pretty novel approach to dealing with the "I want to play a Glitterboy!" phenomenia and that was we all started out as vagabonds and had to earn our O.C.C somehow.  The campaign lasted for about three months and it was pretty fun.  Every successive attempt at making the actual game of RIFTs work (only as a player, RIFTs is not the kind of game I'd ever want to run) has never really panned out well.

What RIFTs really did for our group and me personally was it broke the ice.  I realized that really any genre could be just as fun as D&D.  So I became much more willing to try new systems.  I eventually would gravitate towards indie/small press RPGs, stuff like FATE, Vincent Baker games, etc. etc. I think I owe my willingness to do so all to RIFTs.

These days I play anything but D&D to be honest.  I have come to prefer Dungeon World to any version of D&D.  Not because it is somehow inherently better, but because it is for me as a DM pretty much just as satisfying and far easier to pull off, taking 10% of the prep time, etc. etc. Again I am not bashing D&D, OSR or any other RPG out there I just have found that this year anyway DW is filling the D&D void rather nicely.

There is talk in our group of an Iron Kingdoms foray so that might end up being the next game I run.  So who knows.  I'm not holding my breath for 5th ed. but I will take a look at it and give it the benefit of the doubt rather than just auto hating it.