On Gaming: Role-Playing Systems
I took some time today to look at the aftermath of the D&D Fourth Edition release, mostly because I finally broke down and ordered the Player’s Handbook (after much hand-wringing) from Amazon. Dude, it was like $15 off the cover price.
Some of this greatly intrigues me, especially since a lot of what I read sounds like Wizards stepped directly into my head and picked out some of the stuff I was asking for. Tougher low-level characters. A more fluid approach to combat. Online tabletop role-playing. I can’t actually speak about the rules themselves yet since my book hasn’t arrived, but I’d be a liar if I said the things I was hearing weren’t stirring a bit of excitement in me for the chance to dive into an adventure.
I like the RPGnet review of the game as a good place to get a broad sense of the changes. Random Average lays out the influences behind some of the adjustments to core mechanics and sirtayls on Dragon Avenue rolls his eyes at the flamewars that erupt as people dissect the new edition. And then Dork Tower’s John Kovalic notes some strange decisions made in the Monster Manual, and decides to run with it.
Part of this intrigue is because, now that tabletop gaming is back in my forebrain, I’m interested in finding not necessarily a steady campaign to participate in but some willing folk to join for a run through a session or two. I also have some ideas for one-shots bubbling in the back of my mind, so goes my fascination with clattering dice (at the moment). In pursuit of this thought I did some digging on other settings and systems and found the free quickstart guide to Call of Cthulu. It was almost enough to make me regret my decision to buy D&D4e instead of the CoC core book. Which suggests there was some sort of internal debate between the two that didn’t exist. It just turns out that buying D&D prohibited me budget-wise from also picking up COC.
But man do I love the base system mapped out in the overview. It’s percentile-based for the most part, but the game also uses other polyhedral dice (bonus) and most delightful to me is the character advancement system which has skills improving as they get used. It’s elegantly handled and very attractive to someone like me who has always, like most role-players, loved advancing a character but personally I’ve always felt the abstraction was pretty hokey.
Some people collect role-playing games mostly to reverse engineer their mechanics and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. I’m not really that kind of guy, though I’ve toyed with plenty of different systems from Palladium’s d20-based concepts to the strict percentiles of DC Heroes through various D&D incarnations, Hero’s low-roll mechanics and more. I enjoy comparing them but my attraction to a particular game is either strictly mechanical (like GURPS) or, more frequently, primarily based on setting (Shadowrun). Which may be why I’m so fascinated by CoC’s impressively intuitive mechanics, because I was drawn to the game because of the setting and I found myself unexpectedly surprised by the rules.
Which brings me back to D&D and I wonder for a minute why I’m intrigued at all with the game. Part of it is the culture of games, it’s kind of like my day-one purchases of Halo sequels. I’m not a huge Halo fan but it matters to gamers so it matters to me. D&D is that way; if you want to guarantee you’ll find a game you can dive right into at a convention or with an impromptu gathering of gamer nerds, you better learn D&D. And like it or not, D&D is a force in the community so it merits attention.
It’s just good they keep making changes or I don’t know what we’d all have to fight about.