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#RPGaDay 2017 -- Day 14

Which RPG do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

 Huh. This is actually kind of a tough one, since nowadays nearly all of my games are set pieces: six-episode miniseries designed to allow players to sit in (or sit out) as they want or need to, without feeling like they're being eliminated from the table. This has the side-effect of letting me try out a bunch of different systems to see what feels good to both myself and to my players.

That said, if you said to me today "OK, you're gonna run a 2-year campaign, what system will you use," my knee-jerk response would be Savage Worlds. Despite the problematic name, SW is a good, solid, abstracted system that fills nearly all of my needs. It's light without being too light for my players, it's got some crunch so folk can dig into the mechanics, it has a good character advancement system, it's got plenty of bells and whistles and levers for both creation and advancement, as well as getting the players involved and invested at the table, and there's plenty of support for various different settings.

"OK," you say, "but you can't use Savage Worlds, what else?" Well, then I'm probably going to get fussy about changing the rules after the question is asked, but if pressed I'd say that I'd probably use Apocalypse World in one of the powered-by-the-Apocalypse games/settings available (depending on my mood). I would also point out that if you're going to keep ruling out my choices after I make them then this exercise will get tedious, because it'll take a while for you to get me to say 'D&D', and even then I'm going to say 4E before I get to any other version. We'll have to get through 'GURPS' and 'Hero System' before we got to D&D, and I'm not sure there's anyone left in the world who runs GURPS.

But you asked, so there's my answer.
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