Dungeons & Dragons

It kickstarted the imagination of countless nerds. It wasn't the first RPG but it was the first cohesive and marketed well enough to succeed. A truly monumental achievement in the assigning a complex set of rules to do nothing other than harness storytelling.

I'm going to assume that this includes later editions of the game as I've only played 3.5 and 5th edition. It's really just the quintessential pen and paper rpg. There are others, some better, many worse, none that have the legacy of this. It's actually quite impressive in both design and the reach it has.

Kind of a perfect game. The player has so much input that if they don't like it, it is their own damn fault. The freedom and adaptability of the game makes it truly limitless. Twin Peaks played in D&D: https://youtu.be/e57NzQMHK-Q

I'm rating this, not on the 1st edition rules, but on the appeal of Dungeons and Dragons for me over the years. I can't say if it's the best RPG out there, but it's the only one I play, because it has the lore, the culture, that magical "something" that is one-of-a-kind, even though Wizards has tried to stifle it.

There are plenty of better RPGs out there but D&D's omnipresence makes it a lot easier to get a game going, and there's something to be said for that.

You god damn better believe I'm going to bed everything you throw at me and my character will die of orc AIDS or something equally fantastic.

This is my rating of the first edition.

This is where it all began. So many things I love in life come from playing D&D as a teen.

The version from 1992, Rules Cyclopedia, that was what got me into these games. I tried running it a couple years ago, and...it worked! Probably better than the last few times I tried playing AD&D in the modern era. Advice: Use THAC0 to speed up combat, use the skill system to give your characters a little more personality and utility, and let the DM roll thief skills (and read the DM procedure for thief skills — they aren't as broken as the internet says they are).