Hello, I thought that a little introduction to both me and this column would be in order. I am a mid 30’s Northern California white guy. I went back to school in 2004 and am close to a bachelor’s degree in Political Science / Pre-Law. Law school by next year I hope. I play D&D proudly and talk about it in public with no difficulty or fear.
I will be posting this column once a week or so. It will be as well researched as I can make it and a bit intellectual but if you think either of those is a liability I hope that you will go away now and leave the big people to talk things over. I am writing this column because I find that no one will listen to me rant about how cool gaming is in the middle of a game session, they always want to get back to the adventure at hand. So I will share my thoughts with you and maybe get some feedback more helpful than, “So what’s in the room.”
RPG’s I have played (mostly as GM):
- GURPS - still love it but to complicated to GM.
- Rifts - one of my players has a moral objection so we don’t play this anymore – I will discuss the objection in a later article.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness - a dear old friend.
- Palladium RPG - beautiful world but clunky character creation and no player creation of magic items killed this one.
- Amber Diceless RPG - too much emotional investment.
- FASA Star Trek RPG - not enough emotional investment.
- Twilight 2000 - Beautiful character creation but if you only have one or two military buffs in your group, like mine, it gets too bogged down in explanation.
- Advanced Dungeons and Dragons – the one that most people now call first edition. My personal favorite, but little modern support, and increasingly expensive books make it impractical. Also my players don’t like the limited choice of weapon proficiencies based on class and the limitation on race class combinations.
- HackMaster - supposedly based on the first edition rules but too overtaken with extra stuff, and too mush emphasis on humor. A new edition is said to be in the works based in Kenzer Co.’s Kingdoms of Kalimar, could be interesting.
- 3rd and 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons – This is the game that I am playing now and that I am likely to be playing for sometime. The simple reason is the Open Gaming License. The single best idea in gaming, ever. I am currently starting up a campaign in the DragonStar setting that I have wanted to run for a while and this setting is the perfect example of why the OGL is so great. Magic swords and laser guns, mighty wizards harnessing the souls of the dead to power android bodies, ancient red dragons flying through space and doing battle in powered armor, all this and the rules for it all run without a hitch. That is pretty cool.
This column will not be composed of my musings and reviews of different games as the forgoing might suggest, though it may take that form from time to time. For the most part it is going to be made up of my thoughts on Role Playing and what it can teach us, what it has taught me, and hopefully how it can be used to explain and even predict the events of a world that seams so different from those that we game in but is the sun to the many shadows that are our game worlds.
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