I once played a game of Microscope (rpg) where things just clicked. It was me, @Rafu 🇮🇹 :heart_pan:, another friend of mine and maybe someone else. We created the story of how humanity eventually left earth and colonized other planets, and we were just somehow attuned, each contribution fit perfectly with everything else. I've played various games of Microscope, but that one was special

added! Glad to have you aboard!

I have a few that stand out in my memory...

Call of Cthulhu I GMed a 1920s era Cthulhu session. The plot was a professor on his deathbed who tasked his students with banishing something he summoned in his youth. I think it was the 1 starter adventure printed in the Cthulhu rule book. The game would've been just ordinary, but in the final act, the players have to maintain a ritual chant for the whole night to finish the banishment spell. This was in the 1990s when Gregorian Chant was in vogue for some reason. By sheer luck, I'd grabbed a Buddhist Monk chant CD from the music store's bargain bin. I thought it might be like the Gregorian stuff, and it was only a dollar or two... well that shit was straight up terrifying as hell. 100% from a horror movie soundtrack, even though it wasn't meant to be. So during the session, I played that stuff while the PCs were fighting off the monster and trying not to fail -- their characters were chanting and so the CD played men chanting. It worked. Too well. About halfway through that part of the game, the players asked me to turn it off, because it was too scary. That was legit the only time I've ever seen PLAYERS get scared at a horror game session and not just their characters.

AD&D 1e, the Trap Back in the days of AD&D 1e, our GM set up a new adventure for us. The entry point was (railroad) for us to be kidnapped by the villains and then have to escape. The villains' means of taking us was for their magician to cast Sleep on all of us and then just grab our sleeping bodies and go. Well, the GM forgot that elves were immune. So our elven ranger just woke us back up by hitting us with arrows he'd broken the tips off of. the GM was mad for years that we'd foiled his great plan so easily. His lack of foresight and his anger over that is what made that memorable for me.

DragonCon 2004 At DragonCon in Atlanta, a group of us ran a multi-session D&D 3.5 campaign. We each were running pieces of a guild war. I had a relatively minor side plot that was kind of a throwaway to the main plot, but it hinged on raiding a small tomb and stealing some relic that was considered sacred to the opposing guild. The only reason this session was at all memorable was that it's the only time I've ever seen D&D players struggle with alignment. About halfway through the session, the players began to question their orders and really think about whether desecrating this grave was a Good or Evil act. In the end, they decided to cut out and leave. Their characters never entered the tomb, and it was the best thing I've ever seen players do: reject the plot and do what they felt was the greater good.

DragonCon 2004 That same story arc from above, but the final session was an epic battle between the two guilds. I was a player in this rather than a GM, since there were more GMs in the arc than this session required. We had about 20 or 25 players at the table, split into Guild A and Guild B, facing off. The goal was simple: Guild A wanted a young girl to escape and survive; Guild B wanted to capture or kill her. I don't remember the specifics on why: I think she was a kidnapped child of a guild leader maybe? Or something like that. Anyway, the GMs set up the board with us on opposite sides. There was a GM for each of the two factions who talked to the players, handled any questions / rules concerns they had, and tracked anything that was happening out of sight of the other side. Then there was an initiative-keeper GM. All he did was call out names in initiative order. Then there was a master GM who oversaw the board and ran the thing. I have never seen (A)D&D combat move so fast or smoothly. You had about 3 seconds to blurt out your actions. Within sight of your side's GM, you had already made any dice rolls, so there was no waiting on dice. No pauses to look stuff up. That combat ran smoother than anything I've seen. I died fairly early on, but the game came down to the last player on my side, trying to help the girl escape. As she ran off the edge of the table to freedom, he was taken out. So our guild won and saved the girl, but we all died in the process. That shit was about as epic as D&D can be, both from a heroic death perspective and from a smooth-running, massive, D&D session perspective. I've never seen D&D combat go that smoothly before or since.

In the dark two weeks ago, I played a D&D 5 game in which our combat encounter for that session involved no one getting hit and no one even trying to attack the bad guys. I've never seen a D&D combat encounter where no one even tried to hit the enemy. We were sneaking through a village that was magically darkened to pitch-black night (darkvision worked, but not my halfling eyes, sigh). The same bad guy who created the darkness has raised a horde of undead, who patrolled the village. We, being lowly 2nd level characters, knew if we "awoke" the patrols, they'd probably destroy us. So we had to sneak through the village without getting caught. So we had to pass through in the darkness, all the while knowing that if failed a stealth check, we died. I failed a stealth check. We survived by me casting a spell to make noise in an empty house, distracting the undead long enough for us to get away.

A great game is one that makes its mechanics make the theme work. One where the mechanical decisions I am making are the same as the in-character decisions I am making.

A great RPG for me, like others said, has mechanics that support the themes it talks about, efficiently and effectively. Dogs in the Vineyard has a progression system that makes your character change based on their direc experiences and failures, and it does in small incremental ways. For a game that has an important theme of personal growth, it does convey that theme very well in its mechanics.
Another great RPG is Kagematsu: the mechanics are very simple, but they interact and interwine in such a way that makes me deeply *feel* the love and shame, the hierarchic distance between my character and the Ronin and the uncertainty of romantic relations.

For boardgames I think a really standout game must be replayable, which for me means that it must be deep, each game can be very different from the others.
That, or it must be really memorable.

I'm also a sucker for a small number of relatively simple rules with interesting interactions, but that's more a matter of tastes than quality of the game. If a game becomes too complex it's usually a turnoff for me

I try to schedule if I can, especially if I have an ongoing campaign. Otherwise I have no problem deciding what to play on the spot, I'm used to demoing stuff at conventions and play a lot of one shots. I do prefer to know in advance when a gaming evening is due though, so that I can prepare a few games for that.

Since COVID quarantining began, I once again have a scheduled game. Every Sunday afternoon, some folks I went to high school with sit down and play an online D&D campaign. It's good to be back into gaming.

Schedule games!

Of course - COVID ruined my schedules - but I am a big fan of repeating scheduled games, since I can work around that

I... uh...
Giving away games?
Selling games?
What is that?

I don't think I've given away many board games. A few where I had multiple versions of the same game, I've given away -- I had half a dozen different Risk sets and at least 2 or 3 monopolies; I've given many of those away and don't regret it, either because I have other edition(s) which work just fine (Risk) and/or because never playing it again would seriously not hurt my feelings at all (Monopoly).

I've sold / traded quite a few #ttRPG games. Many of those, I look back on with nostalgia and regret losing. But, honestly, I wouldn't be playing them now if I still had them, most likely. My RPG collection is too vast anyway.

@Craig Maloney - I had a similar experience with Gumshoe. Now it rivals Fate and PbtA as my favorite system.

@Craig Maloney - I don't know if you've seen the playtest for Swords of the Serpentine, but that one is great. They asked me to hold off on posting my blog publicly until it's out at the end of the month, but those are some of the most evocative rules I think I've ever seen.

I started with MERP and Rolemaster, and I liked them generally. In particular, I always thought the combat was much better in the specific sense that (1) the higher your combat roll, the more damage you inflict (no second roll for damage); and (2) different weapons are better for different types of armour! AFAIK no other games do this, and I loved it.

Now... I play mostly heavily-narrative games, in which often there's not even the _concept_ of combat in the rules. Definitely no hit points or equivalent.

And I guess you could argue that I used to be confused and sceptical about GM-less games... and that's basically the only thing I play now 😅

@Chuck Dee @Charles M @Craig Maloney @Curt Thompson @Douglas Bailey @Eric Franklin @frasersimons @Jesse Butler @Joseph Teller @Keith Davies @Marsha B @Martijn Vos @Martin Ralya @Moe Tousignant @Nathan V @Patrick Marchiodi @PresGas (OSR) Aspect @silverwizard @Stephen Gunnell @Stuntman

I've started roleplaying with AD&D2 but then played especially 3rd edition, like A LOT. Then I grew tired of the unneccessarily complicated mechanics and lots of subsystems, and now I play much lighter, narrrative-focussed games.

As for boardgames, I think 7Wonders is the one that falls into this cathegory for me: i played it at a convention and immediately bought it. But then I played it more times, and I don't really...understand it? I feel you can't really make a long-term strategy, you just have to optimize each hand. It seemed a lot more varied and profound to me than it actually is.

Muchkin is another game i had a lot of fun playing for the first 3-4 times, then got really bored: each game is basically someone getting to level 9, everyone else using everything in their hand to prevent them from leveling and then the next level 9 player winning the game.
I think Munchkin is funny to read, not enough fun to play though

Burning Wheel is a game I read once and basically went "this is the dumbest shit", then I read it again when older and listened to people play, and now it's most of my favourite game.

WoD is a game I played a lot in university, then then found The Dresden Files and Unknown Armies and I can't look at WoD without seeing its inbuilt mysogyny and racism that I always used to be able to just try to ignore.