The counterculture that emerged in the 1960s

The RPG Systens

Introduction

The goal of this post is tell about some systens of RPG and a little about their history, to show the people the diversity you can find in this world

Inspiration

The inspiraction of Role Playing Game comes mainly from two things, the first one is the fantastic literature that were very widespread in the beginning of XX century and the Tolkien's books (The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings) beyond the board games had a lof of importance when we say how the RPG began.

D&D, the beginning of RPG.

Two men were responsible about the game creation, the first one is Gary Gygax (1938-2008), a student of Minnesota University, before the creation of the RPG, he invented a game called Chainmail in 1971, it was played with thumbnails, a very common thing in RPG games. The second creator was Dave Arneson(also of Minnesota University), he did a scenery that was named Blackmoor(1971), this was the first time that some ideas of the famous tabletop game appeared, like a narrator, the dungeons(dangerous places full of mosnters and treasures), health points, and others.

Together they created Dungeons and Dragons(D&D), the fisrt oficial RPG game, the ideas said before were included in the game, it takes place in a medieval fantastic world, with dragons, mages, warrior and many things. Along the years, lots of differens editions of D&D were made, with a big variety of rules, but with the classical medieval world.[1]

Today D&D is the most famous RPG in the world, and it inspered a popular catoon with the same name "Dungeons and Dragons"(Caverna do Dragão in portuguese and I don't know if they came back home).

GURPS

The initial GURPS means Generic and Universal Role Playing System, its developer was Steve

Jackson. Before he create the systen, he had developed others games, one of them was Melee(1977), it was a set of combat rules, wich could be used in many games, based in it, he created his first RPG system, Fantasy Trip, but the company wich published it(Metagaming) failed. Steve Jackson continued creating games to the market and in 1986 he finally completed a successful set rule, the GURPS.

Its purpose was to be suitable to all kinds of  scenry, not onlye the Medieval game wich was so famous that time. This idea attended what the customers wanted and this did GURPS become so successful in the market.[2] 

Storyteller

In the 90's decade Mark Rein-Hagen had the idea to create a new  horror scenery Vampire the masquerade, along with Tom Dowt( the creator of shadowrun), the developed a system wich use

D10 to calculate probability. This was the beginning of storyteller.

the focus of this game is the interpretation of your character, different from D&D and GURPS, as long as some situations could be solved by interpretation instead of combat and dice rolls

A interesting thing about it is that character sheet is very simple, there are many skills and characteristcs wich are bought with characters points.

There are many worlds and varietys of storyteller, with the same base, but there are different branches focused on their own character kinds(EX:vampires, werewolf,mages,etc..).  The most famous is World of Darkness(WoD).

         Traveller

Elaborated by by Marc William Miller in GDW (Games Developers Workshop) in 1977 (and later by other publishers as it is nowadays by Momgoose), inspired by series of scientific fiction stories, just like 0"Dumarest saga" by E. C. Tubb, Stories of the Fundation" by Isaac Asimov, "Space Viking" by H. Beam Piper, "Known Space" by Larry Niven, and much more, is a perfect sample of the sci-fi genre since it was made when the market were almost all about the rule sets that contemplated medieval and fantastic scenaries,such as Fantasy Trip, Empire of the Petal Throne, and the "sacred" Dungeons & Dragons.

Even though there were alredy some future focused systens, Traveller was the true innovator: in a context where the majority of the rule set brought the concept of characters sorted by classes, the ones made for Traveller were shaped by choosing skill by skill, and so it were possible to create a huge diversity of professions and capacities, therefore, you just needed to combinate some perks in order build, for example, tecnicians, ship mechanics, smugglers, merchants, soldiers, spies, revolutionaries, and so goes on.[4]

Defensores de Tóquio(D&T), a Brazilian RPG

A very cool thing about D&T is that, different from the others, it is one brazilian game.

Created by Marcelo Cassaro, initialy aiming to become a suplement for RPG Toon, however it finished like an independent system , publisher of the magazine "Dragão Brasil" in 1995. Taking references from the Japonese pop culture,just like animes games and tokusatsus.

The most famous D&T edition is 3D&T published in 2000, It had scenery that comes from some virtual games, like Mortal Kombat, Street Figher and Megaman. All of them was legalized by the companies wich created these games.

It was made to initiant gamers, the rules were simple and fast to learn, The Asian scenery made it very popular between the young people. In this game, the players interpret heroes who have to protect Tokyo from many villains.

Ths system is not serious, but a thing to have fun, so you can create all kinds of characters, like Pokemon trainer, teenager mutant ninja turtles, hunters, power rangers and everything you can imagine.[5] 

Referências:

[1]http://rolandodados.com.br/uma-breve-historia-da-origem-do-rpg/
[2]https://zonaneutra.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/gurps-um-pouco-de-historia/
[3]http://universorpg.com/do-alem/sistemas/storyteller-uma-introducao-ao-sistema/
[4]http://saiadamasmorra.blogspot.com.br/2011/03/quando-falamos-do-genero-literario.html
[5]http://www.garotasgeeks.com/defensores-de-toquio-um-rpg-em-que-zoeira-nunca-acaba/