SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the would-you-play-differently-online? dept.
Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of Dungeons & Dragons, reported that 8.6 million people played the game in 2017, its biggest year of sales in two decades. That mark was eclipsed in 2018, when D&D sales reportedly grew 30 percent. All of those D&D consumers are snapping up the Fifth Edition, a new rule set released in 2014 that emphasizes a flexible approach to combat and decision-making. New players don’t need to learn as many arcane rules to get started, and sales of D&D starter kits skyrocketed.
Adding to the newfound popularity are thousands of D&D games broadcast on YouTube and the live-stream service Twitch. “Critical Role,” a popular livestream and podcast, features actors playing the game.
[...]What makes D & D[sic] different is that we can never forget about the human beings behind the avatars. When a member of my group makes a bad choice, I can’t look into his face and shout insults the way I would if we were playing online. He’s a person, and my friend, even if he also inexplicably decided to open an obviously booby-trapped trunk, get a faceful of poison and use up my last remaining healing spell.
My 50th-level Magic-User Ferrick the Magnificent scoffs at these neophytes...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 09 2019, @03:20PM (3 children)
Try 5e. Seriously. It doesn't really dumb down the math so much as optimize the equations so that the math gets the fuck out of the way of the story a little bit more. That's a bad thing for the folks who played ranger/clerics of Meilikki in 2e (min-maxing munchkins for the young whippersnappers) but a good thing for everyone else. It ain't perfect but then what is?
Personally, my favorite system was a homemade one that went with a game we called Bullethead. We had very basic mechanics, similar to 5e, and beyond that the rules more or less read "convince the DM".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Wednesday April 10 2019, @12:38AM (2 children)
Pretty much this.
I played many games with school friends while walking around at lunch/recess, travelling in the car, etc. All because of the simple ‘GM is always right’. Our usual GM guy always a die with him that I’m sure he just pretended to use. But playing basically systemless lead to many fun games unencumbered by awkward mechanics. We’d see a movie, and afterwards we’d basically be characters in the universe of the movie. Or even the characters themselves. Great memories.
We’d also play AD&D (1st edition back then). And we’d bend and rewrite rules almost always.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11 2019, @09:10PM (1 child)
From 4th grade to 9th we did RPGs using only a rotating DM, basic Greywolf style inventory lists (usually made after a few games had occurred and everybody agreed to carry over characters, which usually didn't happen except on long trips.) Part of this was because D&D was *BANNED* at school, to the point of confiscation of materials if you were discovered with it. Jack Chick did a great job scaring that stuff away, which was even more ironic since one of the teachers was reading JRR Tolkien in class to be rebellious (he since turned into a religious nut ranting his views to gradeschoolers and abhorring the magic and pagan aspects of Tolkien's world. I just happened across a friend of a friend whose children went to two of the same schools I had.)
The most frustrating thing to me with RPGs was reading pre-written campaigns that said the GM/DM should force the characters to go a certain way and 'throw rolls' to ensure they succeed or fail. At the point where the GM becomes arbitrary decision maker of the session you no longer need rules to begin with. Rules are only there to ensure everyone has, in theory, an equal and fair chance of success. In practice unless the adventure is tailored to your characters and you have some idea of what trials you might come across, many characters will either be munchkinned, too specialized, or too generalized for a randomly chosen quest for the right level of characters (or skillpoints for games that chose to eschew levels, like WEG's D6 system.)
The only RPG materials I have bought in the past 15 years have been consignment books for systems dating to the 1990s. Outside of Games Workshop there were still companies both small enough to be responsive to the playerbase while also big enough to hold major licenses. In the years since it has turned into an ever increasing churn of material (Whether FASA derived games, D&D derived games, or other systems both old and new) going from 5-10 years between major core rules changes to a few years tops. When I collected books in the 90s, I purchased between ~1994 and 2001. Battletech Boxed Set 4th Edition, Mechwarrior 2nd Edition, WEG Star War's Rulebook (eventually lots of other books as well as what adventure journals I could collect.) and later AD&D 2nd Edition, the later black covers.
By far the best of those products was the Star Wars Adventure Journals. They combined all the fun of Short Story Magazines with all the stats, pictures, maps, and campaign ideas of an RPG magazine but with polish more similar to one of their sourcebooks. They published quarterly including shorts from all the major Star Wars fiction authors of the day, Zahn, Stackpole, Hambley, Anderson, you name it.
I'm not sure if a point came across, or even what it once might have been. But like the woolly masses popularizing D&D, I think the best days of pen and paper RPGs are long since past, and while playing around a table can still be run, wasting money and time on arbitrary rules that will change at a whim might instead be better spent on reading/sharing stories for a universe you all want to role play in, and either rotate game master duties, or have faith in the game master you school without binding things up in stuff rules. If you really need a die roll or coin toss to make things tense, a gm can just as easily decide an arbitrary one for the difficulty as can someone digging it out of a rulebook. And unlike the rulebook example there is no need to waste time making sure it is correct, because the game master can always adjust it next time if it is too easy/hard.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 12 2019, @10:34AM
We never had that problem. The DM cussed as often as the players and quickly learned to think on his feet since "Yet again the GOP1 triumphs over a carefully crafted DM plot," was so often heard around the table.
1 We had a strong tendency to explore dungeons by always turning right.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.