Archive for category Roleplaying
Changing styles of roleplaying
Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Roleplaying on May 6th, 2009
Last night I had my first encounter – pun intended – with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Last week I played another session of Call of Cthulhu. Reflecting on both, it struck me that my roleplaying tastes have definitely reversed from my earliest days.
Back then, playing a game which heavily lent on figures, maps, counting out range squares and throwing around spectacular powers and feats with abandon – while rolling very, very high modified numbers – would probably have thrilled me no end.
By contrast, playing a game which heavily lent on talking, investigating, puzzling, finding clues, trying to put those clues together, and sweating over Library Use checks did, in fact, bore me to tears.
Hence, D&D 4E is about twenty years too late for me; and I first played CoC twenty years too early.
Roleplaying: slight return
Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Roleplaying on April 17th, 2009
Lots going on right now, and not much time to blog about fripperies. However! Considering I’ve mentioned roleplaying in theoretical form more than a few times recently here, I thought I’d mention it again in actual, practical form.
I’ve been lurking on the Brighton Roleplayers Yahoo! Group for a very long time, and had played before with a couple of other list members. I even knew they had a regular meet-up, venue and all. What with all this internal thinking about roleplaying, I figured I should bite the bullet and, y’know, actually go do some roleplaying.
I got a warm welcome, not least thanks to Kelvin, who found the blog here from some trackback I suspect and emailed me to helpfully point out what I already knew, but just hadn’t vocalised. As a result I ended up taking a seat in Kelvin’s off-and-on-again Call of Cthulhu game, which was a whole heap of fun, and very well summarised by Kelvin himself over on the BRPG blog.
Following that game, fellow player Ben asked if I was interested in playing a Pendragon campaign he was planning to run, using the rules from Green Ronin’s new A Song of Ice and Fire roleplaying game.
Pendragon? Talk about your magic word. I’ve wanted to play in a Pendragon campaign for about twenty years, and never quite got there, so I jumped at the chance. Thanks to the Easter weekend we’ve managed to squeeze in two sessions so far, and my only regret is that I already know I won’t be sticking around for the long haul. Perhaps my knight can perish in one glorious final battle… after I secure his bloodline, of course.
Ben has been writing up our sessions and circulating by email, but so far hasn’t posted them anywhere for you to peruse. Suffice to say I’m having a blast. It probably helps that Ben issued me with a lethal archer for the first session, Perin, who can fire off two arrows without blinking and put each of them through the smallest chink in armour from several hundred yards.
He’ll be moving on soon though due to the ravages of old age, but in his place I’m playing Alein, who I’ve described as “Prince George from Black Adder III, as a knight”. Yes: he does have ‘naive’ as a drawback….
It’s all good stuff, and I’m deeply indebted to Ben, Kelvin, Ad, Manoj, Rich and especially Paco for getting my butt back around a gaming table, and making the return so fun. The only sore point? I should have done it six months ago.
More on all this soon, especially on Pendragon itself – the great game I never quite seem to be able to get to play….
A thing of power
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Personal, Roleplaying on April 14th, 2009
Taken this weekend in mid-roleplaying session. I wasn’t even using the die, it just looked good in the light.
Very happy with how this turned out considering it was off my cameraphone.
Godspeed, get well and good health
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Roleplaying on April 9th, 2009
After a false alarm earlier this week, I wake up this morning to read that sadly Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (along with Gary Gygax), passed away late on April 7th, at 61 years old, falling victim to cancer.
In another part of America, Aaron Allston, who I raved about just the other day as author of many Star Wars novels, plus Champions 5th Edition and my personal all-time favourite RPG book, Strike Force, suffered a heart attack while on his latest book tour. He required a quadruple bypass operation – not exactly an easy procedure – but I’m thankful to say, is on the mend.
After hearing about those two roleplaying icons, it felt slightly spooky to read a blog entry from Jeff Grubb (designer of Marvel Super Heroes, amongst many other things, and now a designer for Guild Wars 2) talking about his health, which in his words is “pretty sound”, but “could be better in many ways”. I’m sure Jeff’s going to be designing for many years to come, but all of this reminds me how far the roleplaying hobby, along with everything that span off from it, has come.
Dave Arneson was born in 1947, so he was approaching 30 when Dungeons & Dragons began to really take off. Thirty odd years later the roleplaying hobby has been an industry, and is now shrinking and maybe changing back into hobby it was, but it gave birth to something else: the computer-based descendants of RPGs, both single and multiplayer.
Those games, I’d argue, are struggling to find their defining moment, when they’ll break out of the original mold roleplaying formed for them. They’ll get there, but it might take a while. After all, today’s independent RPGs are fairly radically different from the original dungeon delvers.
Today though, there’s time for some reflection. I’ve never met Arneson, Allston or Grubb, and of course never will meet Arneson now, but all three of them have had a huge impact on my life. Perhaps I should start acknowledging that with more than a blog entry.
There are plenty of kind words for Dave Arneson around the web, by people who knew him and some who didn’t. I’ll list a few below, but this quote from Jeff Grubb summed up Arneson and Gygax’s legacy for me:
Gary and Dave were the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of our hobby, the names by which later generations would conjure. They created what would be modern roleplaying, and the rest of us are caught up in their wake.
You said what?