Most of us started in D&D - so D&D doesn't count. What is the non-D&D system that made you realize you could do this TTRPG thing in a different way, that while not D&D, gave you joy?

For me, can't remember which one was first:

Talislanta. It was the ads in Dragon that got me interested (it was either that or Jorune both staple adverts - but I picked up Talislanta) and my mind was blown. Talislanta still blows my mind. Its system is still insanely good - better than D&D imo.

Marvel Super Heroes - It landed on my table around the same time, and simply has never left. WAY ahead of its time. It showed me how to scale games to high-power levels and not be afraid of letting players cut loose. Invaluable for GMing from a totally different perspective at that time for me.

Honorable Mention - I also dove into Palladium Fantasy around this time too... and yeah that completely clicked with me. Super-high-octane D&D with the dials turned up.

MERP - probably doing it wrong in the beginning when I ran it for the group but had so much fun we didn't care. Ignored the tolkien baggage and set it in Karameikos. The players hacked and hewed their way through Goblins and Orcs with jarring E Crush criticals and gore galore. Found it hard to go back to D&D after that.

Star Wars D6 - when it first came out we played it to death. Doesn't (to my mind) hold up too well to 'high level' play but had a lot of fun sticking to the Empire back in the day.

Marvel Superheroes - Villains and Vigilantes wasn't doing it for the group, I found Golden Heroes a hard sell on them and we were never going to get Champions up and running ("Point buy? So we spend all this session and next just making characters? Fuck that." etc). Made supers gaming easy. I preferred DC Heroes (and still GM it now) but Marvel kicked off Supers gaming big time for us.

Others like Tunnels and Trolls and Star Frontiers grabbed our interest for a while and we tried pretty much everything from 1981 to around 1988 at one time or another but more often than not came back to D&D (BECMI was the winner of our edition warring. AD&D 1e came second and other editions trailed far behind or came nowhere) because the players had years invested in the characters.

  Gamma World.  Then Star Frontiers (maybe within 2 weeks of GW).   

RQ3 would be it for me. It made HP ever so much easier to handle without the guess work. Armor subtracting damage is brilliant! I've played a ton of systems since, but RQ is a default, and with so many sister games I can pick and choose certain rules what I want for my game.

I'm not sure to what extend it gave me "joy", but the first non-D&D game I ever played was the Robotech Palladium RPG, cuz a couple people in my first group were obsessed with that series. It was nice conceptually and had cool mechs, though, I wasn't super into it. I also played RIFTS with that same group soon after, and that one I freaking loved--the setting, I mean. By that time I realized that Palladium system mostly sucked, though, it had its cool imaginative bits and greater emphasis on skills, which I liked and D&D lacked, even with Proficiencies in 2e.

I'm not sure which came later, cuz it's all a haze now, but I know I played Shadowrun, WEG Star Wars and Cyberpunk 2020 around that time (also CoC, but I never fully got into that one either). Shadowrun probably came first, which I struggled to read through (2e I think), and was the first one in my gaming circle to actually understand the rules (eventually). I liked d6 dice pools, and the idea of increasing degrees of success based on number of "successes" scored, including attack damage being affected by it. This was the first RPG I played with some measure for Degrees of Success and attack damage being affected by how well you rolled. I also liked skill-based magic (also a first for me), and the idea of mystic characters just being able to see in the Astral (as they always should, IMO).

WEG Star Wars had a simple task resolution mechanic that was easy to understand once you got WTF "pips" were, and felt like a solid elegant system that was easy to use. Also the first system I ever played that tracked Health Condition instead of some HP analog for damage. Cyberpunk 2020 was the first RPG I ever played with a Roll+Mod vs TN mechanic, which eventually became my go to task resolution mechanic for homebrewed stuff.

The game that blew my mind, though, was Marvel Super Heroes RPG (FASERIP), which came a bit after Cyberpunk. It was the simplest, most elegant game I ever played, basing everything around easy to use descriptive Ranks to track how strong your abilities were, with degrees of success baked right into the core resolution mechanic. I loved the way you could just slap a Rank on anything and figure damage, damage resistance or ability rolls/difficulty based on that. It made it easy to just improvise powers and stuff, cuz everything was basically just "Power Rank Damage", "Power Rank Range", "Power Range Difficulty" to resist, etc. Which eventually led me down the rabbit hole of effect-based powers, which I extrapolated from FASERIP (years before I became aware of Champions) even though it wasn't technically an effect-based system per se, but close enough.

Traveller: Skills instead of classes, 2d6 task resolution, and risking death during character creation to get a better start were all major departures from what I'd been used to.

   The VERY first RPG system other than D&D i played would have been M.E.R.P. ... i was fascinated by the cover art of the old
"Bree and the Barrow Downs" module and bought it at waldenbooks along with whatever else i was buying that day.  Still have
it today and i still consider it one of my favorite modules for any system.  Well after having it, it wasn't long before i bought the
rulebook and more supplements.  Being a Tolkien fan made it easy to do so.

   The "OTHER GAMES" can-o-worms being opened, i also soon after started playing Stormbringer (2nd Ed), which i bought the
first time i saw it (being also a Moorcock fan).  Followed soon after by Call of Cthulhu (also liked Lovecraft's stories).

   Paranoia and Tunnels and Trolls i also learned later that same year, and played both quite a bit, i'd thought Tunnels and Trolls
was dumb when i bought the book as a joke, and was suprised to find i enjoyed it as much as i did. 

   Had a bunch of other bit and pieces of various systems from Steve Jackson's Wizardry to parts of the Atlantean trilogy, though
I never got to play them fully, same with Hidden Kingdom (& "Fantasy Wargaming") which i never quite wrapped my head around
though i cribbed something game-like out of combining the two books.

   By 1987 i discovered both Warhammer and SPI bagged wargames, and i was pretty much finished with RPG's for a very long
time to come after that, until a few years ago when i started working on the campaign we've been playing now. 

My first RPG was actually Drakar & Demoner, which was originally a Scandinavian Runequest offshoot (no Glorantha though). Because of this I could never make sense of D&D as I always thought Runequest was better. I also played Rolemaster, which was a bit D&D-like in some ways, but when we streamlined it (heavy houseruling)  it was actually one of the more fun systems.

Star Wars d6

Star Wars D6 and FASERIP Marvel. Not entirely sure which one I really got into first. Shadowrun followed those two.

Serenity. One of the few times that a skill-based ruleset actually had some sense to it. Elegant die mechanic. The Big Damn Heroes Handbook for it only felt natural. Not patched on.

Runequest.  I think it was 2E, but might have been 1E.  It was borrowed, and didn't have it very long, but did get to run a few games with it. 

I am eternally grateful that Apple Lane didn't really have a lot of Glorantha embedded into it (at least not where it mattered).  Such a great module for teaching the rules to both GM and players.

Though we played RQ a lot like D&D, only skills-based.  The first radical departure was Toon, followed very closely by Fantasy Hero 1E. 

Even though I read Dragon Magazine for years and knew about other games, I never played anything but D&D until I went away to college.  I can't remember which was first, but it was either Star Wars d6 or Vampire the Masquerade 2e.

Quote from: tenbones on February 08, 2022, 11:42:39 AM
Most of us started in D&D - so D&D doesn't count. What is the non-D&D system that made you realize you could do this TTRPG thing in a different way, that while not D&D, gave you joy?

For me, can't remember which one was first:

Talislanta. It was the ads in Dragon that got me interested (it was either that or Jorune both staple adverts - but I picked up Talislanta) and my mind was blown. Talislanta still blows my mind. Its system is still insanely good - better than D&D imo.

Marvel Super Heroes - It landed on my table around the same time, and simply has never left. WAY ahead of its time. It showed me how to scale games to high-power levels and not be afraid of letting players cut loose. Invaluable for GMing from a totally different perspective at that time for me.

Honorable Mention - I also dove into Palladium Fantasy around this time too... and yeah that completely clicked with me. Super-high-octane D&D with the dials turned up.

Dungeon World

The FASA Star Trek RPG and Starship Combat Simulator.

My friends and I had tons of fun with that game. Totally different set of rules than DnD, but it worked really well for that game and milieu.