Quote from: danbuter;637961D&D or Vampire.

I doubt anything else even comes close to the sales of these properties.

If you are talking pure sales, then d6 Star Wars and D&D. Vampire came in a distant third to those two. D&D is the top of the heap, but during the late 80s and early 90s, d6 Star Wars was beating it in sales and popularity which coinsides with the low point of TSR. I'd say that Vampire was could have been equal in popularity, but at its heyday it was competing with the first big surge of CCGs which really hit RPG sales hard.

I should probably amend that this is all from my experiences in the USA.

I have to back D&D, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and Warhammer FRP as the four foundational RPGs.

If you look at every other RPG, they all borrow from those four in some way.

D&D: Leveling up
Traveller: Skills and core task resolution
CoC: Genre emulation
WFRP: Setting directly integrated into rules

WFRP is probably the murky one, but here's how I see it: Take away the Old World, and the system, specifically careers, makes no sense. Porting the rules to Middle Earth or Greyhawk requires you to do massive changes to the list of careers. IMO, it paved the way for things like Vampire's clans.

Quote from: Chairman Meow;637983I have to back D&D, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and Warhammer FRP as the four foundational RPGs.

If you look at every other RPG, they all borrow from those four in some way.

D&D: Leveling up
Traveller: Skills and core task resolution
CoC: Genre emulation
WFRP: Setting directly integrated into rules

WFRP is probably the murky one, but here's how I see it: Take away the Old World, and the system, specifically careers, makes no sense. Porting the rules to Middle Earth or Greyhawk requires you to do massive changes to the list of careers. IMO, it paved the way for things like Vampire's clans.

Warhammer isn't even close.
Tekumel had integrated world and setting long, long before and it was common in a lot of the games that rippled out of D&D and Runequest. I would say that Runequest's tie to Glorantha was the first try at this and that was in '78 whereas WFRP came out in '86 long after the dust had settled. Warhammer does nothing to change approach to the game or genre

Quote from: jibbajibba;637990Warhammer isn't even close.
Tekumel had integrated world and setting long, long before and it was common in a lot of the games that rippled out of D&D and Runequest. I would say that Runequest's tie to Glorantha was the first try at this and that was in '78 whereas WFRP came out in '86 long after the dust had settled. Warhammer does nothing to change approach to the game or genre

Were Tekumel's mechanics specifically tied to the setting? OTOH, I do vaguely recall the magic system and magic items being steeped in Tekumel lore.

Quote from: Chairman Meow;637993Were Tekumel's mechanics specifically tied to the setting? OTOH, I do vaguely recall the magic system and magic items being steeped in Tekumel lore.

Pretty certain it does but even putting it to one side. there are games from Marvel Superheroes, to James Bond, to Bushido, to Toon to Paranoia etc etc that had embedded settings in mechanics before GW thought that building an RGP was a good idea.

We aren't looking just for great game systems here we are looking for the innovators that changed the paradigm in some way and had an influence on future designs.

In the early 1980s it was pretty obviously AD&D/D&D, Traveller and RuneQuest. I'm not sure the idea of a holy trinity still works today.

The real question here is "trinity of what?", because that very much affects the answer.

Trinity of the most popular RPGs? There "D&D(all versions) and Vampire/WoD" blow everything else out of the water.

Trinity of the initial defining games of their genre? You'd need a lot more than a trinity. There certainly D&D defined fantasy, Traveller defined sci-fi, CoC defined occult, Vampire defined pretentious posing, etc.

If what you're looking for is a Trinity of games that had the most overall influence on the hobby, then it would have to be D&D, Vampire, and "D20", though the latter is kind of cheating as it didn't have a single product.

If you're looking at the three games that had the most innovative influence, there would be D&D (virtually all other RPGs are in some way imitative), maybe the first entirely point-buy game (Champions or GURPS, I forget which one) and Amber Diceless.
Pretty much everything else, certainly including vampire and CoC, are derivative of one or more of these.

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