January Journal: Gaming

[liv]

cxcvi very endearingly had me roll dice to pick today's date, and asked for Gaming, of a non-computer kind. There are brief mentions of you doing some in the past, but only light whispers.

I have "roleplaying" listed among my interests primarily because when I made this journal in 2003 table-top roleplaying was one of my primary hobbies. I haven't really gamed since I left Dundee in 2005, though, and I do kind of miss it but it also doesn't really fit into my life any more.

I started out with D&D fairly late in life, about third year in college when my girlfriend darcydodo dragged me along to a gaming group. It turned out that darcydodo was friends with several people I knew from school, so I reconnected with shreena (not a gamer, but friends with the people I met gaming) and elemy. And through them met loreid and her then partner kathrid, and wychwood who did reenactment but not I think roleplaying. kathrid was big into both tabletop and LARP, I think mainly Call of Cthulhu. loreid had played a bit but never GM'd before, so a mixed group of people with more or less experience of RPing made good guinea pigs. pseudomonas also played, (and another guy called paulbo_garvins whom I've mostly fallen out of touch with). The point is that the people I met at or through RPing pretty much became my crowd at university, lifelong friends much more than the people who I knew through my college or subject. I think that's partly because we all joined LJ soon after graduating, but partly because I really found my people with the crowd who wanted to spend an evening a week inventing shared stories.

loreid was a really excellent GM. I think playing with a deeply geeky but slightly more mature crowd than the stereotypical D&D fans really helped, because we were all inclined to use the game rules and manuals as a tool for actual role-playing, rather than obsessing about stats and numbers. We played 2^nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as this was right around the last gasp of that system, just before the 3^rd edition was released. I played Thora, a true neutral human fighter who had some *cough* issues due my slightly strange interpretation of her true neutral alignment and my more or less insufferable attempt at playing a low INT character... We played through two or three fairly substantial campaigns with the same characters and had a great deal of fun.

When I was in Dundee for my PhD I joined the student role-playing society. This turned out to be an inspired choice, because they were deeply geeky in all the good ways and none of the annoying ones. Really friendly people, they'd known eachother for years but were still welcoming to newcomers, and the society provided a really good chance to relax and have a social life outside my PhD, which otherwise could have been really difficult to achieve. The biggest campaign I played there was a homebrewed system, adapted from Superheroes to an Arthurian setting and tweaked a bit to encourage more character play and less dice-rolling. Really really good, experienced GM, and a group of players who were really committed to collaborating on the best possible story. I played Rohanna, a magic user who was somewhat a Mary Sue version of me, with skills in herbal medicine (when I was actually doing a PhD in drug discovery) and giving convincing answers to questions, and a weakness of getting on badly with Christians. Also the really hilarious advantage of being the only person in the adventuring party who wasn't bound by rules of chivalry... I won an award for "best roleplayer" for that character, and had an immense amount of fun. I still have the trophy, consisting of a Magic card attached to a wooden stand, on my mantelpiece, and visitors are either horrified that I openly display something so nerdy, or super-impressed by it. I did a little bit of GMing myself, mostly in one-off games, and with darcydodo and the Dundee group I attended a residential roleplaying con where I reconnected with redaloud whom I'd been friends with at school. The first thing she said to me was "I didn't you know you were a gamer" and it took me about three seconds to realize that she hadn't said "I didn't know you were gay".

The other thing about the Dundee group was that they got me into German-style semi-abstract board games, which I really very much enjoy. That kind of gaming I've continued with since I haven't had time for tabletop. In fact I had been aware of Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne from a few years back, because my good friend MK is in fact German and introduced me to the games somewhat before they became mainstream over here. The Dundee roleplayers alerted me to the fact that this is a whole genre, and we had some excellent board game nights, which was particularly good for social contact when I was too deep into the PhD to commit to regular weekly roleplaying sessions.

It turns out that jack likes those kinds of board games too so we've played quite a bit together and he introduced me to alextfish's board game crowd. For a while mathcathy and I were on the periphery of the local game shop game night. Again, really lovely people, and through them I was introduced to quite a wide range of games I really like. Sadly I kind of drifted away from the group when they moved their game nights to a part of town I can't easily get to in the evening, and when I started doing regular exercise because I just didn't have time in my life for regular exercise and regular board gaming. I currently play quite a lot of Dominion, because it works for two players and you can do a couple of rounds fairly quickly. And I take breaks from work by playing moves on Yucata.de, who have really a great selection of games, a really sensible system for asynchronous play and a really good atmosphere. I'm really enjoying Vikings and At the gates of Loyang (the latter is like a slightly less over-complicated version of Agricola) there. And I play IRL when I have time and company to spend a whole evening playing long play complex games, which isn't as often as I might ideally like.

I keep being tempted to investigate journal-based roleplaying, which I know is a big thing on DW. I suspect I would really enjoy alternity, but also that I don't have enough spare time to enjoy it. I think that's the root problem with role-playing games; the only way to really get much out of it is to put in a lot of time, and that doesn't work so well with having a full-time job. So I'll probably just go on feeling vaguely wistful about my former role-playing self. And you know, maybe start up an old-school D&D game in my nursing home or something.

[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]

Comments

[green_knight]

Two games we're enjoying tremendously are the Discworld themed Ankh-Morpork (where you try to gain control of the city, it's mainly a card game with some really interesting moves, completely suprising, and you can win in a number of ways that aren't always obvious to your opponents) and Witches, where you take on the role of a witch in Lancre trying to deal with various problems (including outbreaks of Elves) and an unfortunate tendency to cackle. Both are great for 2 as well as 3 players (haven't played with 4), very intelligent, and usually end up fairly open right up to the end.

[flippac]

Witches worked well for me with four last weekend. Was Anagramma, managed to narrowly avoid cackling too much and scrape enough VPs on my last turn before my ex accidentally revealed two elf tokens in one turn and nearly killed us all!

[green_knight]

Anagramma, grr. (caper_est managed to have a spiffing game yesterday, while I (as Petulia) was scrambling for decent cards OR decent throws of the dice. (2&3 against Queen of the Elves. Reroll. 2&3. Reroll. 2&4. Think the universe was trying to tell me something?)

We've had a surfeit of elves, and with a group of three, we nearly died of complications.

Fun.

[mathcathy]

I'm not so keen on the Ankh Morpork game because it has a larger proportion of luck to it than pure strategy games like Dominion and Agricola, but enough strategy that my friends and family who like traditional dice games aren't willing to learn.

[green_knight]

I've not played either of those. Dominion is on our shortlist, so I'll get a chance sooner or later. Any tips on the millions on expansions out there? Are they worth having at all? How much difference do they make to the gameplay?

[mathcathy]

I bought all the ones which had 25 new randomiser cards for the £25 and none of the ones that had more like 10 for the same value.

The game is no better / worse with a smaller number of randomiser cards if you're playing it infrequently, but if you really get into it and play it often, the more decks you have, the more variety and the broader the range of strategies to think about.

Every set is slightly different. Seaside has a boats and islands theme and allows for cards to be played in one turn and still used in the next. Prosperity allows for a lot more cash to be in play at any one time. Intrigue gives choices in how you play each card. Alchemy includes potions as a type of treasure. I haven't played any of the others enough to bring any insight to what their differentiators are.

There's also an extra card you have to order separately called "Black Market" which is particularly fun to play with if you have a lot of sets around.

[metaphortunate]

You know there's gonna be a shitload of us old gamers in the nursing homes looking for a DM. :)

[damerell]

I'm not so convinced it counts as nerdy these days, when people sit at home and play World of Walking, which is sort of the same except without any roleplaying or meeting of actual people.

[wychwood]

I hadn't done any table-top back then, because although I'd had geeky friends none of them were that particular flavour. I was in an email-based free-form role-playing thing on Usenet where we were all mysteriously kidnapped by alien space bats and dumped in 1801, though!

These days I play once a fortnight (usually) in a Babylon 5 game kathrid DMs for me and his brother. It helps that it's such a small group, so arranging dates etc isn't so difficult, and four hours once a fortnight is still a bearable commitment. If you had local people you wanted to game with, something like that might still be workable?

I'm sure you would enjoy DW roleplaying, but I agree; it does seem to eat lives! I never felt like investing enough to get really into any of those.

[vatine]

I play in a long-running GURPS campaign that seems to eat, typically, a day per month. When I say "long-running", I seem to mean "since October, 2007" and most, if not all, of us still play the original characters (I am on my third, the first was planned to go away Soon, the second was pure mishap).

I don't know if that counts as "put in a lot of time", though. In total, yes, there's been a fair amount of work poured into it, but none of the dollops of time have been that huge, so all in all it doesn't feel like massively much.

[forestofglory]

I have simlar wistful feeling about table-top RPGs. They were an important part of my social life in late high school, and afterwards when I was figuring stuff out and and attending community college. I pretty much stopped when I moved away for uni and have never quite gotten back into into them.

In high school one of my good friends joined a Changeling: The Dreaming LARP and tagged along and loved it. That lead to me getting invited to play in long D&D campaign. Which lead to other games.

R still plays a lot. He is in pathfinder society which means he plays with bunch of people, frequently people he doesn't know well. I don't want to play with people who are unknown to me.

Also I have become much more critical of the "kill the the monsters, take their stuff" narrative. In fact I'd really prefer not to have to pretend to kill so many things. I keep joking that one day I'm going to write Tea parties and Toast, a game about bickering over pastries and having parties.

[shreena]

We will investigate Dominion - do you know of any other good games for two? B and I are a bit lazy about organising greater numbers for games...

[damerell]

ceb and I enjoyed "1805: Sea of Glory" although it is quite grognardy.