Warning! Role-playing game nerdity ahead.
Was talking with friends I have gamed with for the last 40 years tonight. We lamented that we just don’t have time to get together to game regularly any more.
Part of the problem is we are now separated by distance and we don’t all live in the same area any more. This makes getting together problematic as travel is involved.
We’ve tried online gaming, using things like Discord to be able to talk and Roll20 for a virtual gaming tabletop. At best, if we properly sacrifice a live pizza to the Internet Gods, we can get on for two to three hours and maybe get part way through a session of our campaign. At worst we get plagued by tech problems – either someone can’t connect at all, or has a bad connection, or the virtual tabletop fails or gets wonky or some other mishap occurs.
Trying to expand the gaming group so we have more regular players is also a challenge. To have a really good campaign, you need players who are committed and will show up each session, pay attention to what is going on at the table and not be on their smartphones, and are ready when it is their turn so they can contribute to the game. Having folks who don’t have that commitment leads to folks showing up every now and again, or not bothering to pay attention to what is happening. It becomes difficult to have any consistency in the game, which leads to a poor gaming experience all around.
Back at the end of November last year, an old college buddy contacted me about starting up an online campaign. Great, I’m willing to give it a shot.
The first issue in trying to get things set up was selecting the game system to use. He, and several of the other people who want to join in on the game wanted to use the original RoleMaster gaming system from the 1980s. It was a good, solid system, very simulationist, that is, there are rules for everything trying to simulate reality in a realistic manner. If you are in combat with an opponent, and their character has armor, then there is all sorts of math involved with when and where you hit them, how much damage you do, and if they survive the blow. If you get a lucky roll of the dice and strike their character in the head, their armor doesn’t do much to protect them and they’ll probably die from that blow. This is what would be considered a very “crunchy” system. There is a lot of number crunching that has to happen to play the game. This goes back to the wargaming roots of role-playing, and is not necessarily a Bad Thing(tm) its just different to how games can be played now.
It is a good system if you are playing face to face, but not a good system to try to play online. Trying to run a campaign I think would be beyond my capabilities.
The next problem is that as I get older I am less enamored of “crunchy” game systems. I don’t want to have to read through, comprehend, and try to remember a three hundred (300) page rulebook (or rulebooks) before playing the game, let alone try to keep track of it all during the game. I now prefer more “rules-lite” games with a more narrative focus. This type of game doesn’t have thick tomes of rules to try to cover every possible outcome, and focuses more on the story that develops, rather than trying to accurately simulate reality. It depends more on the Game Master making a ruling rather than having to stop the game for five minutes to look for the rule covering whatever is happening in the game.
We ultimately settled on Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. I had recommended a different system (Worlds Without Number by Kevin Crawford) which is sort of like first edition D&D (which I’ve played for forty years and know a lot about) but is streamlined and easier to deal with, rules-wise. There is a free PDF of the rules, so there wouldn’t be any barrier to the other players getting a copy. It was rejected by the group because at one point one of them had tried running a different game system and they had a bad experience with it, so they don’t want to play anything other than RoleMaster or 5th Edition D&D.
I’ve been dragging my feet putting together a campaign. I very much want to play more RPGs. I’m just not sure I want to play 5th edition D&D. I’m also leery of playing online as previous attempts have been less than stellar. I’ve been letting other things get in the way, and some things have necessarily taken precedence.
It’s a new year, so another chance to try and get some gaming in. I’m going to give it a shot and see how things work out. Who knows? Maybe things will go much better than I anticipate.
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