Ask Me Anything: mcneils5

What's your experience with MERP/Rolemaster? What weapon do you use when some heathen says that's not the greatest gave system ever conceived?

At the moment it's currently MERP - one of my friends has most of the 1e books and it's his game of choice when running stuff for my RL group but I've played it for years. Rolemaster was one of the first RPG's I ever played and ran seriously (I have a bit of a soft spot for the crunch and Rolemaster is CRUNCHY lol). As for weapon well that would depend on their armour type and what I had to hand....give me a sec, I need to check a few tables :)

What are your top three board games measured by how often they hit your gaming table?

What is the game on your shelf that is a favorite but gets played rarely?

Should I recognise the avatar? Surely, it has to be something Yorkshire.

You've been on the site for ages. How's the GP community changed over that time?

What's one surprising thing that we wouldn't have guessed about you?

These days Stone Age, Patchwork and Ticket to Ride as I mostly play with my family :)
Twilight Imperium....love it but it is a serious time sync to play that game lol

You'd think wouldn't you lol but no. It's actually the symbol of the Knights of the Rose and Cross which is one of the secret societies from the 7th Sea RPG. Only reason I didn't mention that game in my blurb is I'm not a massive fan of the 2nd edition mechanics so it's not really a game on my radar these days.
I think the biggest change was when the Discord server got fired up. There were always a lot of discussions and engagement on the main site before that but it was a lot slower, these days things seem much more lively but the community has kept quite a special feel that has run through :)
I honestly have no idea.....I've been inside a pyramid, erm, I don't drink booze these days really, I used to drink quite a bit but over the last few years I've found I very rarely want to tbh

What happened to mcneils one through four?

I was going to ask that...

They know what they did….

What rules for Alien RPG do you struggle with the most?

To be honest I've found it to be a very simple light system so far but I'll caveat that by saying I've not run anything to do with vehicle combat yet so we'll see if that adds any wrinkles when that inevitably comes up

A fellow Virgo! What's your opinion toward astrology? Myers-Briggs? Enneagram? D&D Alignment-as-real-world-personality test?

What game do you really want to play but never got the chance?
What game works the best via PbP? The worst?

Erm, yes, those are certainly all things. To be honest I don't think theres any single test out there that can give an accurate representation of peoples traits or personality, people are far too complicated to be pigeon holed like that.....obviously though the "D&D Alignment-as-real-world-personality test" is the exception that proves the rule lol :)
Probably L5R - I've run it a little bit over the years and played it a couple of times but never really for very long. Love the setting and the mechanics in the latest edition work really well but I've just not had much opportunity to get it to the table. I did run a game of it on here which went really well but then Covid reared its head and my bandwidth for playing/running stuff shrank considerably and that was one of the casualties....might come back to it soon though in some form.
The games that I feel like have worked best for me are ones that are quite simple like Alien/Year Zero Engine, very few things needing discussion about with rolls so players can just roll when they want to do something and not really need any GM input. Ones that are a bit tougher are those that are really crunchy or ones that need a lot of collaboration when resolving things, those kind of games a great when you're all sat round a table and you can get a proper dialogue running but when you're doing a PbP game can REALLY slow things down.

As the resident L5R person, are there any books or movies you'd recommend to get a feel for this type of setting?

Your L5R game that I played in was amazing. It's such a rich evocative setting and you brought it to life.

Do you prefer the Roll and Keep system or the narrative dice with 5e? More importantly, do you like the lore reset/changes brought in with 5e, or prefer the older storyline?

Have you heard who is taking over publishing from FFG, and what their plans are for further books?

Since you're a reader, I have to ask:

- What is the best book that you've read that you personally enjoyed, but might hesitate to reccomend to others?

Now I'm not sure I'd be quite comfortable taking that particular mantle lol but for recommendations the couple that pop to mind are any of the films by Akira Kurosawa and theres is a book called Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa which is a fictionalised account of the life of Miyamoto Musashi who was an almost legendary swordsman who also wrote the original The Book of Five Rings.
Very kind of you to say and I'm glad you enjoyed it :) I've got to admit I'm pretty much a convert to the Narrative dice system and I do prefer this implementation over the one done in Star Wars/Genesys to a degree. I think the lore needed a reset generally, things had gotten very weighty and you were running into the issue of escalation in that every new threat needed to be bigger in some way than the last one. The older storyline was great but pretty impenetrable for a new player.

The new new publisher is Edge Studio (https://edge-studio.net/), Asmode moved all of the RPG properties that Fantasy Flight were producing to this new studio. From what I'm aware of the only book that is definitely announced is the Dragon Clan book (Writ of the Wilds I think) but they did say in a couple of places that they were at least going to finish doing the other clan books (Scorpion and Unicorn left to do I think) but that was before they announced the "Adventures In Rokugan" DnD 5e adaptation is coming so I think all bets are off at this point. Hoping that if the DnD version does well it gives them the additional funds to funnel into doing more for the narrative system.

Honestly, Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed reading it for the most part but the language is very dense by todays standards and can be a bit of a slog in places.