Roleplaying Games

One thing I have been meaning to do is to do a little entry on the gaming I have been doing at university.

Part of the motive for this is to showcase a few potential candidates for a game to run over the summer holiday.

Inspired by (or shamelessly plagiarised from) m’ colleague’s recent anime entry, I shall present them in an orderly fashion.

Dungeons and Dragons

After a little (read masses of) initial resistance, I finally agreed to play some 4e D&D. Not being a particularly mature product yet, it still has quite a shiny freshness to it, and, unlike it’s predecessor 3.5, there has not yet been a multitude of supplemental rules published by different authors which could be combined into unbeatable game-breaking characters. We were able to play a standard, diverse party just from the core books and our adventure was constructed very nicely from just those same sources.

The rules have been altered and it has been commented by many that they have the aura of an MMORPG, rather than a tabletop game. Certainly the variety of abilities available to even the most no-nonsense fighter and the fact that these are used ‘at will’, ‘once per encounter’ or ‘daily’ reinforces that image. The basic races and classes have also been mixed around in a similar way. Dragonborn are stupid. Tieflings are too nerd-wet-dream. Eladrin appeal to the same people that elves do, but elves are still there! I personally think we have enough ‘beautiful, slender, wise humanoids,’ why can’t we have fat elves anyway?

I can only see myself hating the sort of people who would pick the new Warlord class with its “Role: Leader” description. I get some consolation from the fact that the Warlord is more of a support character (“Status inducing magic, Cloud? Why, those suck!”)

These observations aside, we had a really good campaign. It’s still fun to be a halfling rogue which is the important thing. It is certainly more combat oriented (not a great thing) but with less need for those bloody miniatures (a brilliant thing!) The books are very pretty and very colourful (more MMO-like tendencies?) and the system seems very sound. Overall I think it is an RPG for the new generation and a good one at that, although I think I will always have difficulty thinking about it as DnD.

Call of Cthulhu

Being very familiar with the works of H. P. Lovecraft makes this one an obvious choice. Having played it before, I was very aware that the mood of the game varies massively from group to group. This was a fairly relaxed game. In it I played a doctor with a birdwatching hobby (the idea being to justify as many points in the “spot hidden” skill as possible!) in a group investigating the murder of a mutual friend by suspected cultists. As anyone who knows this system will expect, it only got weirder and more horrifying. I didn’t end up going permanently mad, although I did have a period of sobbing uncontrollably at unfortunate moments for a couple of days during the course of the game.

Call of Cthulhu remains a favourite due to the combination of cults, myths, sanity loss, 1920s setting and the overall futility of trying to fight the malevolent, uncaring gods whose destruction or enslavement of humanity is practically inevitable. While most RPGs are combat heavy, this remains a more plot-heavy, intrigue-filled alternative with a decidedly darker edge.

CthulhuTech

I have left this one until last for a reason. It was only by chance that I got to play this, since only one person had a copy of it, but I am so very glad that I did. Imagine Neon Genesis Evangelion mixed with a nearly-apolocalyptic Call of Cthulhu. It has mecha, it has bio-mecha, it has god-aliens, it has cults, it has sanity loss, it has ritual magic, it has ingredients for great stories and a nice system underneath, including a good mech combat system. It has scope for lots of types of games: Foot soldiers in enemy territory, mecha pilots fighting for the Earth, investigations into sinister plots of unspeakable cults or combinations of all of these.

It uses an interesting dice system where many d10s are rolled at once. Matching numbers and runs of numbers give higher scores which adds an extra element of fun to each task or attack. It has comprehensive rules for mecha and has many types to use. There are two races to choose from to add a bit of interest. There are no “classes”, just professions, which is a lot less restrictive and means, for example,  that characters can be pilots with academic skills or soldiers with engineering abilities.

We played for only one session (a long one though) and completed what I suspect was the introductory adventure but it was excellent. Though the whole game is a shameless pasting-together of many different settings and concepts, it actually feels very coherent and is great fun to play. This was a welcome new game for me and definitely a new favourite.

Others

We had a brief and disastrous game of Paranoia, a game which made no sense to me and involves never insulting The Computer and only touching things of your colour. I also took part in one guy’s home-made system which was a bit of an “I-wish-I-was-a-vampire”-clusterfuck. These have been omitted for obvious reasons.

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