RPG a Day, Day 20: Yourself at 55

Seriously, it is pretty good.

Before I tackle the question of games I'll be playing in 20 years' time, an additional point about yesterday's post: how could I have forgotten "Raid on Innsmouth," from Escape from Innsmouth, as a contender for favourite scenario? I have actually never run this thing, but it's brilliant -- the investigators volunteer to join (or are bullied into joining) the raid on Innsmouth mentioned in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. There are a number of different teams doing different things in the raid, and each winds up consisting of an investigator and a number of military or Treasury department pre-gens. You will be surprised to learn that many of these brave young men will not make it. The division allows the scenario to explore a bunch of different environments in a way that would be very different to do plausibly in sequence. I've even wondered if this wouldn't actually be a better way to do Masks of Nyarlathotep, sending one PC from the original group to Kenya, one to Shanghai, one to Australia, etc., and then recruiting a team of locals who might actually know something about wandering around the outback or speaking Chinese.

Anyway, today's topic is "what games will you still be playing in 20 years' time?" To answer this question, I've looked back at the games I was playing 20 years ago to give some indication. Of the games I was playing in those days, there are only two that are really still in my to-play pile: Call of Cthulhu (even though I haven't actually played that much of it lately) and the various World of Darkness games (even though they are much changed).

In a way, this makes me a little unhappy. Call of Cthulhu is a fantastic game, of course, but the White Wolf games are ... just OK. Some good ideas hampered by a gooey mess of a system and a world that's equal parts good stuff, messy contradiction, derp and who-gives-a-shit. However, Vampire: the Requiem at least is well-suited to the kind of social/political live game I like, and I really like the group of people I play it with, even though I'm not wild about the game itself.

I would be happy to be playing CoC in 20 years, but I really don't want to be playing another dingdang edition of Vampire, at least not month in, month out. I'm having fun playing it in my current group, but I don't know that I would join another game of it.

As for games that I've started playing since I was 15 that I think I'll still be playing in 20 years, I think that, coming to D&D late, I've found that there are parts of the fantasy adventure genre that really let me do fun stuff as a GM. I could definitely still be playing some form of D&D in 20 years, although I have no really strict preferences about edition or system. I think that game's got a lot of versatility and therefore a lot of replay value.

The other category of game I currently own that I might be playing at 55 would be things I haven't yet got round to playing. Perhaps by 55 I'll finally have started that Spaceship Zero campaign?