Something like a meme in a more general sense
The question has come up in a couple of different online contexts, and one RL one, relatively recently:
Do you have a game system of choice? Why that one? What attracts you about it?
I started, like many gamers, with D&D, which I first encountered in the early-to-mid '80s because my father, a wargamer since before I was born, bought a copy to see what his friends were talking about. (An aside about being a second-generation gamer: my father tried to teach me wargaming too early. I might have liked it if he'd waited. But he played by mail even when we moved to Mississippi; I remember him getting these packages that were laminated hex grids marked up in wax pencil; he'd ponder his move, erase his old units, draw in his new ones, and pack the boards up and mail them to the next player. Later, he played by e-mail back before most people had heard of the Internet. Like father, like daughter.) He found it lacking on the strategy side, and handed it to me and Brother #1, who happily rolled up random characters and did KIATIS dungeon-crawls, trading off who was the player and who was the DM. Later, I picked up the 2nd edition AD&D books, and was far more pleased with those.
I didn't actually get to game with people other than Brother #1 until my sophomore year in high school, when I fell in with a clutch of freshmen boys in band with me who had a four-person gaming group going already. I managed to fall in love with one of them, and was nursing a non-trivial crush on another one (why did it take me so long to figure out I was poly again?), which made things a little awkward, but they were desperate for more players and having a girl gamer around was sort of intriguing, so they let me play with them at lunch and after school on the days we had marching practice. We all sort of grew out of the KIATIS phase together, although they were all more fond of Big Explosions than I was. They also had a copy of Marvel Super Heroes (the FASERIP system), which we played a few times. It introduced me to the concept of different mechanics for roleplaying, which I found quite intriguing, although I felt at the time (and still do) that that system is Teh Broke.
The next year I was at MSMS, where a few of us gathered in the loby of Peyton a couple of times for dicechucking - 2nd ed. AD&D again. I'm still annoyed we couldn't get a more coherent gaming group together; we could have been freaking awesome.
When I got to Rice, I fell in with WARP right away, and was pretty much immediately exposed to a plethora of RPG systems that I, having been stuck in Mississippi, where there was exactly one gaming store within 100 miles of my home (Black Dog, in Stark Vegas), had never seen before. The two that left a major impression at the time were the White Wolf system and GURPS. Ironically, I can't remember who introduced me to GURPS; I almost want to say it was Willie himself, on the grounds that Steve Jackson is a Ricie and thus the system is itself part of the Random Rice Recursion Network. Since I can't remember which living person was responsible, that'll have to do for the moment.
I can play in pretty much any tabletop system with few complaints, but for GMing, I have to have a damn good reason to use anything other than GURPS. It is, at this point, the system I know best, although if you gave me a few minutes to flip pages in 2nd ed. AD&D I could probably be as facile with it. More, though, its extraordinary flexibility means that I don't have to choose genres. That, of course, is sort of the point, but I consider a lack of genre flexibility a flaw in a gaming system to almost the same extent that I consider rigid character classes a flaw. I don't want to run a superhero game, or a dark horror game, or a pseudo-medieval quasi-Tolkenian fantasy game. I want to run the game that happens. Several of the genres I like, in particular world-hopping light SF and modern fantasy, are really difficult to do in most systems, and the systems that have the worldbuilding I like best (both ancient Tri Tac Systems games, Fringeworthy and Bureau 13) are practically unplayable as games. Similarly, there are a lot of older games - if you've read this space for a while, you've heard me go on about Talislanta and Jorune - that have fascinating world ideas (and, in the case of Jorune, a mixture of fantasty and SF, so it's already cross-genre), and absolutely wretched rules systems. GURPS gives me a framework to hang those older ideas on.
In fact, GURPS is a fanfic system. No, wait, hear me out. A significant number of the older GURPS books were sourcebooks for licensed properties, things that let one play in the Lensmen universe, or in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, or alongside the Prisoner in the Village. Some of their other books were not so directly based on a single property, but - come on, Bunnies & Burrows and its GURPS version were basically Watership Down and Secret of NIMH written as games. I do Derivative Works. The only gaming world I ever wrote that I could even vaguely claim as my personal invention was the GURPS Bronze Age game, and that was largely based on Egyptian and Babylonian myth. But GURPS is a fantastic system to do derivative-property gaming in, especially if you don't plan on limiting yourself to a single property. And because it's so open and so broad, pretty any film, television, comic, or novel world is fair game. I'm sure there are other systems in which you could do the same, but I don't know of any for which it's so easy.
Do you have a game system of choice? Why that one? What attracts you about it?
I started, like many gamers, with D&D, which I first encountered in the early-to-mid '80s because my father, a wargamer since before I was born, bought a copy to see what his friends were talking about. (An aside about being a second-generation gamer: my father tried to teach me wargaming too early. I might have liked it if he'd waited. But he played by mail even when we moved to Mississippi; I remember him getting these packages that were laminated hex grids marked up in wax pencil; he'd ponder his move, erase his old units, draw in his new ones, and pack the boards up and mail them to the next player. Later, he played by e-mail back before most people had heard of the Internet. Like father, like daughter.) He found it lacking on the strategy side, and handed it to me and Brother #1, who happily rolled up random characters and did KIATIS dungeon-crawls, trading off who was the player and who was the DM. Later, I picked up the 2nd edition AD&D books, and was far more pleased with those.
I didn't actually get to game with people other than Brother #1 until my sophomore year in high school, when I fell in with a clutch of freshmen boys in band with me who had a four-person gaming group going already. I managed to fall in love with one of them, and was nursing a non-trivial crush on another one (why did it take me so long to figure out I was poly again?), which made things a little awkward, but they were desperate for more players and having a girl gamer around was sort of intriguing, so they let me play with them at lunch and after school on the days we had marching practice. We all sort of grew out of the KIATIS phase together, although they were all more fond of Big Explosions than I was. They also had a copy of Marvel Super Heroes (the FASERIP system), which we played a few times. It introduced me to the concept of different mechanics for roleplaying, which I found quite intriguing, although I felt at the time (and still do) that that system is Teh Broke.
The next year I was at MSMS, where a few of us gathered in the loby of Peyton a couple of times for dicechucking - 2nd ed. AD&D again. I'm still annoyed we couldn't get a more coherent gaming group together; we could have been freaking awesome.
When I got to Rice, I fell in with WARP right away, and was pretty much immediately exposed to a plethora of RPG systems that I, having been stuck in Mississippi, where there was exactly one gaming store within 100 miles of my home (Black Dog, in Stark Vegas), had never seen before. The two that left a major impression at the time were the White Wolf system and GURPS. Ironically, I can't remember who introduced me to GURPS; I almost want to say it was Willie himself, on the grounds that Steve Jackson is a Ricie and thus the system is itself part of the Random Rice Recursion Network. Since I can't remember which living person was responsible, that'll have to do for the moment.
I can play in pretty much any tabletop system with few complaints, but for GMing, I have to have a damn good reason to use anything other than GURPS. It is, at this point, the system I know best, although if you gave me a few minutes to flip pages in 2nd ed. AD&D I could probably be as facile with it. More, though, its extraordinary flexibility means that I don't have to choose genres. That, of course, is sort of the point, but I consider a lack of genre flexibility a flaw in a gaming system to almost the same extent that I consider rigid character classes a flaw. I don't want to run a superhero game, or a dark horror game, or a pseudo-medieval quasi-Tolkenian fantasy game. I want to run the game that happens. Several of the genres I like, in particular world-hopping light SF and modern fantasy, are really difficult to do in most systems, and the systems that have the worldbuilding I like best (both ancient Tri Tac Systems games, Fringeworthy and Bureau 13) are practically unplayable as games. Similarly, there are a lot of older games - if you've read this space for a while, you've heard me go on about Talislanta and Jorune - that have fascinating world ideas (and, in the case of Jorune, a mixture of fantasty and SF, so it's already cross-genre), and absolutely wretched rules systems. GURPS gives me a framework to hang those older ideas on.
In fact, GURPS is a fanfic system. No, wait, hear me out. A significant number of the older GURPS books were sourcebooks for licensed properties, things that let one play in the Lensmen universe, or in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, or alongside the Prisoner in the Village. Some of their other books were not so directly based on a single property, but - come on, Bunnies & Burrows and its GURPS version were basically Watership Down and Secret of NIMH written as games. I do Derivative Works. The only gaming world I ever wrote that I could even vaguely claim as my personal invention was the GURPS Bronze Age game, and that was largely based on Egyptian and Babylonian myth. But GURPS is a fantastic system to do derivative-property gaming in, especially if you don't plan on limiting yourself to a single property. And because it's so open and so broad, pretty any film, television, comic, or novel world is fair game. I'm sure there are other systems in which you could do the same, but I don't know of any for which it's so easy.