Electronic Table Top Game Play

This is my first post on my experience gaming with G+ hangouts and Roll 20. Both systems work very well. I am pleased that the experience is as much like playing at a table as you can get absent a table, pencil, and dice.

I have done play by email PBeM and play by post PbP in the past and both left much to be desired. There was no way to interact during a scene except with a joint post and with much editing back and forth. With the other services you are there. It is a night and day type of difference and reinvigorated my desire to play table top rpgs.

The game I have been playing is Dungeon World. It is a fine system that precisely captures the old school revival OSR feel with modern rules and flexibility. I have played paladins, rangers, fighters and I class I created myself using the Class Warfare supplement. Whatever type of character you play the game is just as fun and engaging. One of the first rules for the Dungeon Master DM is 'be a fan of the characters'. Once a DM is finished narrating whatever he needs to tell the players the very next thing out of his mouth is 'what do you do?' Questions or situations that normally are elaborately laid out by a GM are worked out between the DM and the players. "What is the king of Alam's name?" a player might ask, "I don't know what is the king's name?" is a typical DM reply. The game is so easy to learn that I have seen neophytes go from zero to playing in fifteen or twenty minutes tops.

The game is designed to make the player characters not just another set of adventurers but the adventurers for their world. They are the ones that bards sing and tell tales about for years to come and if they die it is an exciting moment that can give the player a chance to make a death scene worthy of Boromir or Theoden in The Lord of the Rings.  So pick up the book. It's less than 1/4 of the price of all the D&D books and find a group through G+ or another service and go to town. You'll never regret it.

We're Back

I am expanding the focus of this blog. We're going to be talking about Lord of the Rings. Although the last of the movies are over the books, games, and such still remain. I will also be expanding to cover roleplaying games.

My favorite game is Dungeon World. It is a pencil and paper game that is an updating and simplification of D&D and other OSR games that captures the feel of the old school gaming while having a simple and easy to learn rule systems. This blog has been dormant for a long time. First, we lost many, many members of our families and our professional and personal lives have been turned upside down.

I won't be doing many long posts. I will focus on quality rather than quantity but my real reason is that I am working on other writing projects with hard deadlines. You can play in a Tolkien created world with Dungeon World just as well as with other systems if you give the game a bit of a tweak.

In future posts we'll be talking about the server move for LOTRO. A Lord of the Rings themed table top game, and I'll be reviewing Mindfaring Through Middle-Earth by Michael Martinez a Tolkien scholar and very interesting writer.