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The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

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Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#181

Post by sparkzilla »

nouveaux wrote: post #18

Not only Dungeons and Dragons, board games are making huge waves around the world. As a game store owner, I have observed a huge growth in tabletop games, including board games. So it's probably not a coincidence that the most highly rated board game (at least according to Board Game Geek) is an RPG based board game. At the time of its kickstarter, I think it raised the most money as well. https://boardgamegeek.com/b…

I've just spent the past week reading/watching game reviews on BoardGame Geek. So many great games, so little time and money!

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#182

Post by lmm »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #105
dragonwriter wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4e greatly simplified the rules, which made it far more accessible and playable I think it made it more playable as as an abstract combat game, but the divorce in presentation between the rules and the in-game fiction (particularly acute in the—albeit streamlined, simple, and consistent—way powers were defined) made it less accessible as a RPG in the deeper RP sense usually associated with TTRPGS as opposed to CRPG…

I do agree with that entirely. Our 4e group threw out half the explicit rules and did a lot of improvising. One of 5e's greatest strengths was explicitly telling the DM how and when to wing it and improvise, rather than giving a rule for everything. The 5e DM's guide tells you that you can skip the encumbrance rules, that you can just give a level after every session or two rather than counting XP, that you don't nee…

The only decent D&D games I've played threw out at least half the rules. But at that point wouldn't you be better off starting from a more rules-light system? On the whole I've had better experience with games in the World of Darkness family, and even better with those at a FATE-like simplicity level.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#183

Post by Syssiphus »

tomc1985 wrote: post #66

What a shame that all this attention goes to D&D. There are so many other good tabletop games with exquisite worldbuilding, languishing for attention... Vampire: The Masquerade, RIFTS (my personal fav)

Or TORG .. so many possibilities in that game (badum tss)

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#184

Post by mcv »

mLuby wrote: post #96
hellepardo wrote: post #61

My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in our group went fully blind. There is a complete lack of good multiplayer computer games for entirely blind players (admittedly that is quite a challenge), but D&D requires only imagination, which all of us still have. Highly recommend if you have friends with vis…

Losing one's imagination seems more common than losing one's sight. :(

Fortunately there are plenty of cookie-cutter computer games available for people with impaired imagination.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#185

Post by johnchristopher »

I don't like the new crop and the new style. Tables I played were overtly aggressive in a bad nerdy/intellectual way. I could sense the influence of mmorpgs and competitive tabletop games. I play for the story and the camaraderie, not to master loopholes in the rules and asserting dominance through numbers.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#186

Post by yourapostasy »

hellepardo wrote: post #61

My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in our group went fully blind. There is a complete lack of good multiplayer computer games for entirely blind players (admittedly that is quite a challenge), but D&D requires only imagination, which all of us still have. Highly recommend if you have friends with vis…

Can you please ask your friend from the blind community's perspective, what their take is on using Minecraft Education Edition as a way to access Minecraft? It is more programmable than Minecraft Jave Edition, and supposedly one can interact with the game completely from within the API. The API [1] looks fairly complete, but I can't tell if it has what a blind game player would want to build from.

I just saw a pic-to-Braille conversion bot on Reddit, and your comment made me wonder if something similar could be built for blind Minecraft players. So far, I'm not aware of open source Minecraft-alikes that exposes the game purely through an API, though an open modding API like Minetest's [2] could probably be leveraged.

Googling around for this information leads to a lot of dead ends talking about the in-game Blindness effect, and I'm not a domain expert in what blind gamers would want to see, anyways. But it would be really cool to see the blind community add new dimensions to current game genres through game interaction APIs (though managing that and botting using the APIs would be an open problem).

[1] https://education.minecraft.net/wp-content/uploads/Code_Conn...

[2] https://dev.minetest.net/Main_Page

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#187

Post by Sander_Marechal »

kieckerjan wrote: post #169
kriro wrote: post #155

In Germany there's at least one other big P&P RPG called "Das Schwarze Auge" (sold in the US as "The dark Eye" iirc and not very successful). I think it's a good system and the lore is pretty nice (even though compared to my child-self I now realized a lot of it is heavily influenced by real world history/cultures). Which makes me wonder...what are other native language systems that are popular in the country but mig…

Ah, yes! There was also a Dutch translation of Das Schwarze Auge (called Het oog des meesters, i.e. The Eye of the Master) which got me hooked to roleplaying. There were even tv commercials for it at the time. (Talking about the mid eighties here.) The Dutch version soon lagged behind the original, but fortunately we lived near the German border and bookstores in Germany were loaded with extension kits and prefabbed…

Ha, that was my starting RPG as well :-) I think I still have it somewhere....

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#188

Post by mcv »

hellepardo wrote: post #61

My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in our group went fully blind. There is a complete lack of good multiplayer computer games for entirely blind players (admittedly that is quite a challenge), but D&D requires only imagination, which all of us still have. Highly recommend if you have friends with vis…

No real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game.

There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now), Traveller, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (4th edition just released), and GURPS. There's Savage Worlds for fast-paced pulp-style adventures, FATE for absolutely anything you can possibly imagine (including publications for Dresden Files and others). There's FFG's excellent Star Wars games (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny), and dozens if not hundreds of smaller indie games, many of which are completely free.

We are truly living in a golden age for roleplaying games. D&D is merely the most visible and best-known one.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#189

Post by mcv »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #187
kieckerjan wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes! There was also a Dutch translation of Das Schwarze Auge (called Het oog des meesters, i.e. The Eye of the Master) which got me hooked to roleplaying. There were even tv commercials for it at the time. (Talking about the mid eighties here.) The Dutch version soon lagged behind the original, but fortunately we lived near the German border and bookstores in Germany were loaded with extension kits and prefabbed…

Ha, that was my starting RPG as well :-) I think I still have it somewhere....

My first RPG too. I have all the old books in my big RPG book case. My dad got it when I was 10, and I was hooked immediately, though the system at the time was really simple. DSA has been expanded quite a bit since then.

Incidentally, there's been a Kickstarter for a new Dutch translation that's about to deliver soon. I'm curious how recognisable it still is.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#190

Post by jsjohnst »

mcv wrote: post #188
hellepardo wrote: post #61

My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in our group went fully blind. There is a complete lack of good multiplayer computer games for entirely blind players (admittedly that is quite a challenge), but D&D requires only imagination, which all of us still have. Highly recommend if you have friends with vis…

No real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game. There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now…

Your list is excellent, but wanted to throw one more out there: Cyberpunk 2020.
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