Dungeons and Dragons thoughts.

The last month or so we have been playing D&D with our gaming group. It has been a good way to introduce some new people to, ahem, more geeky games. The campaign we have been playing is led by Dan and is around the "Deck of Many Things" and Gardmore Abbey which we are slowly making our way towards. Click here to see a session report from the start of our adventures. So here are a few thoughts that have cropped up over this adventure. 

Some of our adventurers. Looks suspiciously like LOTR figures.

Sensible Role-Playing.

Getting into the role of a character can be hard for new gamers, of which I am one. There seems to be a fine balance of  sensible roleplaying, and speaking as if you were the character. Err not sure if I described that well so maybe an example:

Our version of roleplaying, "We would like to trade this pearl for that ring."
What the actual character would say but we are to sensible to say, "Oh good sir! I propose a trade, how about this fine pearl for one of your rings?"

Anytime I try to act out my character authentically I feel things becoming more awkward. Naturally this means I don't do that often. However I watched an episode of TableTop (a youtube show where Will Wheaton plays board games with supposedly famous people) where they played a RPG Dragon Age (converted from a video game). They got into it and seemed to have a lot of fun doing it, perhaps an inspiration for whenever I timidly overstep the boundary of sensible role-playing. Feel free to watch it if you have a spare hour, here is part 1.

Character Names

D&D persists with ridiculous fantasy names, which I guess makes sense as it is a fantasy setting. I was quite sensible during my first ever D&D campaign last year where I chose the name Carlos for my Eladrian Warlord. I chose this because of an episode of Freaks and Geeks where James Franco's character played a game of D&D and called his Dwarf warrior Carlos. I tried this time to get a bit more in theme calling my character Lucien (a Dwarf cleric) inspired by Lucien from the Sandman graphic novels.

Dan spinning a story as the DM.

Combat and Theatre of the Mind 

I think if I was going to pin down and say what the most annoying thing about Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition would be, that would be combat! Combat takes ages when you are lv6, it wasn't so bad at lv1 mind you. The main thing which seems to change as you level up are more hit points and more powers, however these extra combat powers often, though cool, don't do more damage. I find that combat ends up being a long drawn out process where you wait 5-10min for your turn to come around, you select a power to use, you roll a dice, do some damage and then wait for your turn to come around again. Obviously there is more strategy to it than that but it doesn't feel particularly intuitive and it is kind of boring after you have done several combats. 

Us fighting a couple of Owlbears, I used a pretty swish technique pushing the Owlbear who looks like the goblin king (what gives) giving my fellow adventurers a couple of opportunity attacks. 

Apart from the models looking cool I think we could do without them. I wan't to try out D&D 1st ed or some other RPG where combat is done as 'theatre of the mind'. It is what they did in Dragon Age (above) and it seems to be both fun and quick, letting the story and the role-playing take more prevalence.

Conclusion

I like D&D, it is a lot of fun when we are solving puzzles and acting as our characters while the story unfolds. However I just get bored during combat, as that takes up about half the time it can get a bit frustrating. I hope there is a RPG out there which doesn't do this as much, perhaps Call of Cthulhu. After this campaign is done I think we will give the Call of Cthulhu RPG a shot. Although going back to Will Wheaton's TableTop he just did a video post about some indie RPGs he likes, one was called Agents of Oblivion. Will sums it up as

You are members of a super secret global espionage team, your entire purpose in life is to stop Cthulhu and the great old ones from coming into the world.

I mean whats not to like about that?

Just to finish up, if you haven't seen the IT Crowd, a BBC comedy, I would recommend it in a flash. One of the episodes involves Moss playing an RPG with some hot-shot businessmen visiting who would normally be entertained by being taken to a brothel. Here is the clip: