Welcome to my second pen&paper rpg post =)
Last week I started to write about the wonderful world of the pen&paper games. Now I will tell you a bit about the different systems which I tried. So let's start with the first game.

The Dark Eye

I hope that is the correct English name for it because it's one of the biggest pen&paper games in Germany where it's called "Das schwarze Auge". Some of you may know the computer games based on it - Realms of Arkania (the first game was released 1992 and I loved it). I played my first game in the world of the Dark Eye when I was 12 or 13 years old. The setting is a medieval fantasy world with dwarves, elves, orcs and of course magic. The world is awesome and described with a lot of details and a timeline that goes on. The magic in this world is also very cool because only a small part of the people can use magic and because of that it feels special if you can cast spells.
I loved to stroll with my pals through the world of Aventuria, fight against orcs and other evil creatures and rescue beautiful beautiful women. As it was my first rpg the games were also a bit awkward and from time to time just plain dumb because we had no idea how to create a good plot and so on but it was fun.
But it also has some negative sides:

When you are playing The Dark Eye then you will roll a lot of d20s (20 sided dice going from 1 to 20) because for every skill check you are rolling 3 d20s - on 3 of your characterics like intelligence or strength. And there are a lot of different skills which your character can have ranging from athletics to weapon skills to alchemy and I think there are more than 40 different skills which you can learn. And there are veeery many rules. If you are visiting a city in Aventuria then you can be sure that there is a map with floor plans of every building. You can say that it's a gigantic living world where time isn't standing still but because everything is described with a hell lot of details it feels like it's regulated what you can do.
If you like a medieval fantasy simulation and that the whole world is described with every house, stone and tree then this is your game XD

After playing in the fantasy world of The Dark Eye we wanted to try something different and because of that we tried

Shadowrun

Welcome in the year 2060 where the world is ruled by powerful companies - where the magic returned to the world and with it also dwarves, orcs, elves, trolls and powerful dragons. Where people enhance their bodies with cyberware. The Megacons are fighting for themselves to get even more power and the normal people have to suffer from that. Because of that there are people needed who can work in the shadows to fight against these big companies well or to fight for these companies if they pay enough money and these people are the shadowrunners. Welcome to the cyberpunk world of Shadowrun.
I love this cyberpunk world where you can play a streetsamurai - a modern samurai who has enhanced his body with a shit load of cyberware to be better than the rest or you can play a decker a more or less normal person in the physical world but in the digital world he is like neo from matrix (the digital world is also called matrix haha).
The player characters are a lot stronger than normal persons and because of that it feels like you are a hero directly out of an action movie and well that's awesome XD.
We also loved to start with weaker chars and create our own little gang with crappy bikes and scrappy weapons.

But Shadowrun has so many rules and they are partly veeery complex well we never really used the full matrix rules because it's like another rpg with a lot of rules within an rpg with also a lot of rules ... kind of like rule-ception. And for every skill check you have to roll some 6 sided dices ... and by some I mean up to 10 or 20 dices at once (if your skill is very high).
But I still love the world of Shadowrun but haven't played it for more than 10 years because my group prefered an other rpg with a fantasy setting and that game is

Dungeons & Dragons

Buuut I will stop here with a kind of cliffhanger because I wrote enough crap for today xD
I will write a bit more in my next post about d&d and maybe also about my favorite game "Splittermond" a new German rpg which tries to use simple rules in a fantasy setting without trying to be a medieval simulation.

What rpgs did you play and why?

Until next time
Byyyeee!