If you could go back in time with one game, which would it be?

[Donnadogsoth]

If you could go back in time to, say, 1978, setting up a company to publish the tabletop roleplaying game of your choice, whether professional or amateur, yours or someone else's, to put it on the market in competition with D&D, refined and tweaked as you please, with of course the original designers being credited (perhaps boggling them as they begin to receive royalties before they wrote it), which would it be? Or was each game a creature of its time and none would flourish any better than what was already on the market at any given time?

[TheYell]

I was there. Without D&D blazing the trail not enough consumers would play any Tabletop Roleplaying let alone the more complicated systems. Where would Exalted be without a generation soaking up "anime" or video games? Where would Pathfinder be without pocket calculators? No personal computers, no home printers?

Plus America was too puritanical to tolerate people selling magic and undeath, so, there goes the idea of selling Warhammer 40k to the grognards.

[woweedd]

I'd probably just release D&D 2nd Edition, with some major modifications. No Race/Class restrictions, have an actual skill system instead of "Non-Weapon Proficiencies.", introduce the D20 system ahead of schedule, that kind of thing.

[oxybe]

4th ed, just to throw everyone for a loop.

[Anonymouswizard]

While I'd love to do this with Fate (especially FAE), I don't think it would have taken off back then. A lot of it's design feels like a reaction to games claiming to be about the story but providing no mechanics. I might have tried with it in about 1994, but it likely wouldn't have caused a massive swerve. We're also a bit early for cyberpunk and steampunk games to really take off based on my research (this is way before my time).

What you'd want is something relatively simple but with a good amount of depth. Not simple to our modern 1-4 pages of rules systems, but not D&D 3.X or 4e. FAE would likely be amazing for this, but I don't know how Aspects and Approaches would have gone down. Dungeon World might be a safe bet to try and shape the industry, moving it more towards player/GM asymmetry and player empowerment, but I'm not certain it would have sold well back then either.

For 1978 the big one to shape the industry would be Edge of the Empire or Age of Rebellion. Edit them to remove stuff that seems weird with only the first movie out, and with a bit of luck shift the entire industry towards narrative mechanics.

Of course, what I'd likely do is take Transhuman Space, edit it to be a completely stand alone book and then release that and watch as relatively few people buy it. Darn my modern tastes.

[Knaight]

If I was looking for another starting RPG, I'd look at one that could take off elsewhere - why compete for the same wargame players when starting something elsewhere and letting the communities merge would work? This suggests something that's both good and very fringe, and for me that means Microscope.

[Iamyourking]

3.5, easily. Thematically D&D is clearly something that people liked, and with the mechanics to back it up I have no doubt it would be an amazing success.

[Honest Tiefling]

Dungeons and Dragons 5e. I just want to see how someone in that time would react to it without having the in-between editions.

I bet tieflings and dragonborn would give a few people pause...

[2D8HP]

Dungeons and Dragons 5e...

WotC "5e" Dungeons & Dragons seems like a good choice to me, I enjoy playing it, and it's got some neat innovation, the thing is a lot of what I like about it is what I liked about a game I was playing back in 1978.

While I greatly enjoyed the games of Shadowrun I played, I never read the rules, so I'll list my top ten favorite games that I actually bought and tried to learn the rules of:

Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Empire of the Petal Throne (1975)

Arduin (1977)

Traveller (1977)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977)

RuneQuest (1978)

Call of Cthullu (1981)

Stormbringer (1981)

Pendragon (1985)

Mythic Iceland (2012)

Dungeons & Dragons (2014).

Yeah, um... every single one of those games was either in existance before 1979, or is based on D&D (1974) or RuneQuest (1978), so I'm not really bringing anything that innovative back in time.

Since I can't get to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin by BART (the San Francisco bay area subway), and I don't travel "where they be Dragons" (or Sea Monsters, Texans, Yeti, etc.), and the address for the crew who made RuneQuest was within two miles of where I live now, I'll pass on D&D and bring Pendragon to Chaosium when they were making it's ancestor, as it's just different enough from RuneQuest to make a difference.

Maybe I'll cross paths with H. G. Wells as he chases Jack the Ripper.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

I'd slap e10 5e, the UA content, and some of the better houserule patches (like an actual skill system) together and go back to the point where TSR was on the cusp of handing D&D off to WotC. Rename everything and make it the Pathfinder to 2e's 3.5
Then get a team together to write a 2nd edition that adds the complexity and depth of Pathfinder.

Alternately, rather than competing with D&D, learn enough Japanese to pitch Pokemon Tabletop United to GameFreak back during the height of PokeMania. If they turn it down, I can always rebrand, come up with new monsters (with an "unofficial patch" containing all the G1 mons), and have a totally unique rpg.

[Slipperychicken]

I'd consider taking a One Roll Engine game like wild talents, and then make something like an Open Game License for the ORE. Perhaps with the tweaks of adding in shadowrun-style contact rules for NPC buddies, clearer guidelines for point-values and die types for deciding a game' power level, and more example characters and monsters.

My high-level vision there is to bring advanced, streamlined, and easy-to-use game design to the industry while giving roleplayers a good vehicle for game ideas other than medieval fantasy tactics simulators (a game about superheroes might be considered more socially acceptable too). TRPGs at that time could benefit tremendously from ORE, and an OGL encouraging small game writers to use it could likewise help the industry a lot.