31 Questions for Barking Alien - Question 5

This one is tough because of my apparently bizarre personal history in the hobby. You'll know what I mean in a moment and it'll be especially clear if you've been to this blog more than a few times.

Question #5 from Gregg Gardell (Croaker)

What's a game that you only played once or twice and never played again, but you now think maybe it deserves another shot?  Maybe you and your fellow players were just young and didn't appreciate it?  Maybe the game was poorly run for some reason and would be better now with a more experienced hand at the helm?  Perhaps it was an early version with some faults, and newer versions have come out that seem more promising?

For me it was a system called Lords of Creation, from Avalon Hill.  We were all in high school, and I think the main reason we never played again was me as the young and very inexperienced gamemaster.  Luckily, I got better.

I have...sooo many of these. SOOO MANY. Though perhaps not for the reasons you mention.

I'm not sure the games I'd want to give another shot to after only one or two sessions were ones where I was too young, didn't appreciate it, where they didn't go well, or because I'm now more experienced.

It was more that the goal back in the day was to try out as many games as possible. I, and many of my friends, wanted to be able to say, "Yep, I've played that". If a game came out, someone in the group was interested and wanted to run it or play it.

I remember my old 'Camp Group' in particular were very much into experimenting with new games. If it was Espionage related, like James Bond or Top Secret, Martin was all over it. If it was weird and/or creepy, Rich would probably grab it - things like Gamma World and Call of Cthulhu. Science Fiction or Superheroes? Well, that was usually me but Martin would get in on these as well. 

I played dozens upon dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds, of RPGs in my high school and college years. Most were one-shots. A single session, roughly 5-7 hours each, was all I would experience with most of these games. Around 1986 or 1988 I became aware of Japan's TRPG industry through imported, untranslated issues of Games Graphix and Dragon Magazine (Fujimi Shobo). This started a mini-obsession to read and/or play as many Japanese games as I could. I still have this obsession but I've got it under control. I can stop anytime I want, I just don't want to. 

Moving on...

The result of all this is that there were games I've never gotten back to because there were always more games to try. As time moved forward this slowed down and favorites developed but yeah, it still happens to this day.

Back in February I got to run the Japanese TRPG 'Space Ship Story' and it was very fun if a bit imperfect because I wasn't used to the rules. I would definitely want to play that again. SMURFS! I was able to run three sessions of it with one group and one session with another and I so badly want to run it some more. Around Halloween of this year I GMed the upcoming Discworld game and it went over really well. Love to revisit that game. 

I could rattle off a seemingly endless stream of one-shots that deserve to be revisited. My biggest obstacle is that these days my groups generally prefer to play ongoing campaigns. They'd rather keep playing what we're playing than take a coveted game day to try something new. It happens of course but its much rarer these days. 

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Barking Alien