I am not going to be of much help. I play mostly my own games--many of them as yet unpublished. Fact is, if I am busy playing other RPGs how can I be creating them? Of course I play and enjoy certain other RPGs that I didn't create, but that's no big deal.

While I believe that there are great, fair, and bad RPG designs, the actual arbiter of a playing experience is the GM. A great GM can make a bad RPG seem fair or better. An inept GM can make the most excellent game system seem pretty lousy.

1. Hell on Earth
2. Deadlands
3. Torg
4. Shatterzone
5. Judge Dredd
6. Dark Sun
7. Legends of the Five Rings
8. Blood Dawn
9. Shadowrun
10. Star Frontiers

1. CORPS
2. TimeLords
3. Macho Women with Guns
4. Hero System
5. Nexus
6. GURPS
7. Traveller New Era
8. Call of Cthulhu
9. Cyberpunk
10. D&D

As a designer, I'm a bit biased to my own designs, so take this with a grain of salt.

1. Call of Cthulhu
2. Ars Magica
3. TORG
4. Castle Falkenstien
5. Deadlands
6. Millennium's End
7. The Babylon Project
8. Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic
9. Legend of the Five Rings
10. Vampire: the Dark Ages

Anything I've been paid money to work on, plus Call Of Cthulhu.

1. Talislanta (my personal favorite world setting)
2. Pandemonium (funniest game ever; I'm prejudiced, but I think it's true)
3. Empire of the Petal Throne (truly original)
4. Call of Cthulhu (great job of capturing the Lovecraft feel)
5. D&D (my first RPG, a sentimental choice)
6. Cyberpunk (a cool idea and cool game)
7. Arduin Grimoire (disorganized but colorful and imaginative)
8. Jorune (great art)

Though I've read many of the games that were released up to about 1990, I haven't had many opportunities to play or read any RPGs since then. Therefore, my opinions are probably quite outdated.

When I run games, I almost always use one of my own game systems. Even when I consider running under somebody else's game setting, I usually convert it over to my own set of rules. But I managed to come up with a list of ten games that I've seriously considered running under thier own rules sytems sometime in the past few years (not that I actually ran them).

1. Elric!
2. Space: 1889
3. Traveller: The New Era
4. Gardasiyal
5. Star Trek
6. Gamma World
7. Ringworld
8. Paranoia
9. It Came From The Late Late Show
10. Over The Edge