I played a lot through high school then got distracted in college. (Beer, girls, tougher classes, etc) I was pleasantly surprised when my last company started a D and D night!
The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
81–90 of 246 posts
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#82I think the main thing is 5th edition - it's really good. I briefly tried 4th edition and it just didn't feel right - way too combat heavy and video-gamey. Then 5th edition came out and it was immediately obvious that it had that 1st edition feel but with all the bugs worked out. I play it with my kids and it's awesome.
If you have any, I’d love tips for running a game for kids. (I’ve never DM’ed or played but am pretty familiar from many podcasts)
Honestly, forget about rules. Just tell a story and let them guide it. You can occasionally throw in some d20 rolls if you want to introduce some risk of failure, and from there perhaps start build in some bonuses which let them customise their characters. But the main thing is just collaborative storytelling (and bad jokes and accents) and the best role-playing sessions I've ever had have involved no dice rolls at all.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#83It's because of Stranger Things. The article sees it as a symptom, but from a lot of people I know, it's actually a cause. Shameless plug: If any of you have ever wanted to try DnD but didn't know how to get started, or if you've played before and want to start again, try playing my fun-optimized rule set, _DnD: TL;DR_ - https://github.com/Miserlou/dnd-tldr
Not just stranger things, but Adventure Zome, The Gamers/Journeyquest, Harmonquest, Nerd Dice there's a lot of D&D in the Zeitgeist.
And its just the best known path in. Someone mentioned Java, but maybe PHP is a better example, something everyone has heard of with pop culture paths in and you can spend all your time there or dig deeper into esoteric paths.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#84It's because of Stranger Things. The article sees it as a symptom, but from a lot of people I know, it's actually a cause. Shameless plug: If any of you have ever wanted to try DnD but didn't know how to get started, or if you've played before and want to start again, try playing my fun-optimized rule set, _DnD: TL;DR_ - https://github.com/Miserlou/dnd-tldr
For myself and a number of friends, Community's D&D episodes were the cause. But the episodes, like Stranger Things, were probably a symptom of larger trends.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#85I'm still hoping for a really good online platform for D&D. My play group has aged, sprogged, and struggles for a regular evening to play. We've used forum-based stuff in the past, which has actually led to some really good role-play heaving campaigns, but it's no good for real-time encounters or the beer & pizza fuelled camaraderie that really makes D&D great.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#86I think the main thing is 5th edition - it's really good. I briefly tried 4th edition and it just didn't feel right - way too combat heavy and video-gamey. Then 5th edition came out and it was immediately obvious that it had that 1st edition feel but with all the bugs worked out. I play it with my kids and it's awesome.
If you have any, I’d love tips for running a game for kids. (I’ve never DM’ed or played but am pretty familiar from many podcasts)
The starter set is pretty good to get you up and going with DMing.
The best bit of advice I can give is to let the kids be creative and don't be too fussed about the rules. It's like improv - any idea is a gift - even if it's an outlandish idea, let them do it, make up some difficulty score and when the dice come up with a failure, try to be as creative and funny as possible in describing the outcome.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#87I'm not sure if it's resurrecting, or just improving it's image, either way it's welcome. Still, it is sad that it is so focused on one game: D&D. It's a decent game, particularly fifth edition, but I can't help finding it a bit... um, artless. Which isn't a problem, sometimes that's fun. But when there are so many amazing and sophisticated RPGs, with game mechanics that expand the form and support interesting play,…
If we're going to go off on a tangent of comparing rpgs to programming languages, I fondly remember GMing a Paranoia campaign back in the day where I took great delight in breaking the rules to kill off the player's clones in quick and gruesome succession. And then they all had lots of fun backstabbing each other to death.
I guess you'd call that RPG the equivalent of INTERCAL.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#88I tried getting friends to play RPG's in the early 1980's but they didn't show much interest until I came across a supply of 6" (150 mm) square pieces of styrofoam (discarded packing material from work) which I painted with gray acrylic paint. I cut some in half and some in quarters and used them to depict the dungeons for use with metal miniatures. After that I had a group which showed up every month for 5 years. I…
Not just empathy - it's also a sense of drama that's required. A DM writes the story in (semi-)real-time, whereas in CRPGs the "DM" (the writers) have to predict player actions in advance and railroad the players a lot more in order to get a good story progression going.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#89I'm still hoping for a really good online platform for D&D. My play group has aged, sprogged, and struggles for a regular evening to play. We've used forum-based stuff in the past, which has actually led to some really good role-play heaving campaigns, but it's no good for real-time encounters or the beer & pizza fuelled camaraderie that really makes D&D great.
Have you tried Roll20.net? I've used it for Pathfinder, D&D, 13th Age, and Blades in the Dark to great effect. The platforms always getting better.
Re: The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons
#90I think the main thing is 5th edition - it's really good. I briefly tried 4th edition and it just didn't feel right - way too combat heavy and video-gamey. Then 5th edition came out and it was immediately obvious that it had that 1st edition feel but with all the bugs worked out. I play it with my kids and it's awesome.
Would you care to share some 'bugs'? I'm always pretty interested in those things, despite never having had a.. session(?) myself. I know of one where you used a Spiked Chain, made yourself a giant(?) so you got a big boost in combat stats, and because of how the chain works you'd almost always succeed in tripping someone, and when they got up got a free counter attack that again could trip them. Another one I do not…
The two main ones that come to mind:
In first edition the Armor Class went from 10 downwards eg AC -2 was awesome. And you had to look up tables (before 2nd edition added the slightly simpler THAC0). That was changed such that numbers always go up and similarly, higher dice rolls are always better (in some circumstances in 1e you wanted lower numbers).
The concept of advantage or disadvantage. Sometimes you'd have to do a bunch of calculations eg -4 for being invisible, +2 for this, -1 for that, etc. Now, you just figure out whether someone has an advantage or disadvantage. If neither, it's a normal dice roll. If advantage, roll 2 dice and take the highest number. If disadvantage, roll 2 dice and take the lower.