The first one I bought with my own money? Hmmmโฆ might have been Traveler? It had a chart, as I recall, for figuring out how much of your brain you were using for a given task and maybe even what part of the brain.
Very weird game. Daniel Greenberg provided this handy link. Alustro, from Fading Suns, perhaps. He was a complete creep and degenerate, but so fun to play.
My gaming group had a bit of a fetish for purity of probability, so that Intentionality could better nudge the results of our karma dice. Barker, set in his Tekumel world. I remember really losing my shit when my Gamma World character died, but that was junior high school, when everything was about capital D Drama. And then there was Black Leafโฆ. So, that leaves Vampire: the Masquerade. Andrew Greenberg asked me if I was interested in writing for the line, but when I asked for a copy of the rulebook to assist in that task, the cheapskate made me buy it!
He still owes me the 20 or so bucks for that. Otherwise, I spent many Gen Cons scouring booths to get copies of the games I was missing. I think different systems are good for different things. The universal system holy grail is, IMHO, as yet unattainable. Still, I have to mention Pendragon as the closest to the holy grail pun intended of elegant game design perfectly wedded to its setting.
I must admit I never played it, so my nominating it here is from the excellent writing and pure comics fandom glee. As Angus Abranson said, Call of Cthulhu is a perennial. Hard to imagine that not still be played by me and my crew in our old age home. It was very intentionally a modern pulp game.
