Hello and welcome to Random Subject Saturday; the day of the week where I expose some of my nerdier interests, and talk about how awesome they are anyway.
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| Assorted gaming dice; the trademark of any self-respecting nerd. And look, they even shine. (Teehee) |
Have you ever sat down and thought: "Man. I wish there was a game that was like real-life where you could do anything you liked."? If so, you might be happy to find there are games like that. They're just inherently multiplayer and don't involve computers. If you are a 90's kid, or born earlier, you may have even played one.
Before I start, I should probably explain what I'm talking about, and clarify something. Firstly, I'm talking about "Tabletop Roleplaying Games" and secondly, they aren't so much games, as systems. (You'll get why I make that distinction in a moment.) Tabletop Roleplaying Games are the great grandpapies of modern video games. They're those crazy old coots that say "In my day, we didn't have any of this technology stuff. We had to use our imaginations to have fun." while watching Commander Shepard headbutt a Krogan. (Fistbump if you get that reference.)
To be fair, they aren't wrong with that. Don't get me wrong, videogames are great and will always be a favorite hobby for me; but playing a Tabletop Roleplaying Game is incomparable to that, despite modern games being based upon them. (Games like the original Fallout and Fallout 2 were based on a gaming system called GURPS.) To put it into perspective, one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of videogames is their elimination of the need for imagination. Like the argument of TV over books, they simply remove all need for you to imagine what something is, because it's displayed at face value and requires no further forethought. Nice as not having to think can be occasionally, that can become extremely unfufilling if you ever get a taste of what imagination has to offer. Basically; if imagination were money, then videogames are expensive loans. They get you what you want, but basically rob you of a greater pleasure in the long run.
Inversely, playing a Tabletop Game is like putting a ton of money into a retirement fund. Maybe not as great at first, but the outcome is far greater than anything you could have had in the meantime. Since these Tabletop games are more like systems than the games you might be thinking about when I say the word "game", this allows them a far greater ability to pull in random aspects from anywhere and take the story anywhere. A computer game can only do what it's programmed to do, these tabletop "systems" as I've called them, are limited by a single thing. Your imagination.
What do I mean by that? Say you're playing a videogame and something annoying keeps happening. Maybe your character keeps dropping their weapon for example, and because of that, you would have to pick the stupid thing up every single time that happened. In the case of a Tabletop Roleplaying Game, and I'm speaking from experience, having done this in the first tabletop game I ever played, you can come up with all sorts of clever tricks to solve an issue like that. In my case, I was playing a somewhat poorly made archer character who kept managing to drop his bow. So I asked what it would cost to buy some leather and strap said piece of infernal pine to my characters arm so that I would not have to climb out of tree's to go retrieve the thing. The DM said that works for him, and so a painful issue was solved with some imaginative ingenuity.
So what do you need to play these tabletop games? ("And what the hell is a DM?" I bet you're asking.) Well, you need yourself, maybe 3 other friends, some time, dice and the rules for one of these Tabletop Games. You might be thinking: "well, what about imagination?". That helps, but usually after a few games you develop one of those anyway, so no stress.
So what's the downside to these games? Well, you can't play them alone. A minimum of 2 people required, but it usually requires a skillful DM to make sure that it's not boring for so few people; so about 3 or 4 is best to start. And of course, before I delay any more, the Dungeon Master is essentially the Storyteller that makes these games work. (and technically only referred to as a DM in Dungeons & Dragons. Other games have other terms.) I should point out that it's a good idea to have the most imaginative of your friends as the DM, since they're the people that get the game going and dictate what is happening in the game.
Your DM is the guy who sits and has some cool ideas for a story, writes them down and comes up with an adventure for the other players's characters to experience, and then describes things as those characters interact with the world he is portraying in the story. A difficult role to explain, but you could essentially liken the DM to the world's puppeteer, pulling the strings in reaction to the events caused by the other players. A hefty burden to carry as the person who determines if the story is one worth remembering or not, but ultimately rewarding if done well.
I will admit to being somewhat bad at explaining things occasionally, so instead of listening to my fanboyisms's, perhaps you're interested in seeing a game like this played. If so, while not quite the same as playing it with friends in person, my resident YouTube favorite Quill18 actually has a 4 part video series (1, 2, 3, 4) on YouTube of him playing the recently released 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons system, which he plays with some of his subscribers online. Check it out. While somewhat informal, it better demonstrates how things work than my ramblings.
So, I'm guessing, at this point, you're either bored stiff with my vague/detailed descriptions and nerdiness, or you're itching to try one of these games out for yourself. If you're the former, I understand. Pretending to be someone else and dictating your actions while someone tells you about the consequences of said actions isn't for everyone. However, if you're the latter, then you're probably looking to find out what kinds of Tabletop Roleplaying Games there are, and where you can get them.
Firstly, there are a ton of them... Waaaay too many for me to mention, and they're not even limited to "Roleplaying" games, which is why I've been talking about those specifically. There's strategy type games like Warhammer that I might talk about at a later date, and many others; but having never played those, I'm going to keep those discussions for other articles.
So what systems do I know about? Well, the first is obvious. Dungeons and Dragons, which is by the company Wizards of the Coast. Essentially the staple of these gaming systems, and maybe even the progenitor of them if I'm not mistaken; it's a fair place to start in terms of Tabletop Roleplaying Games. The rules are relatively simple and make sense, there are 5 editions worth of rules for you choose from, and basically everyone who's every played a Tabletop game has probably played DnD, so with a bit of luck, finding someone to play with shouldn't be all that hard. (Unless you live in South Africa, like me, then it's a mission.) Luckily, the website RPG.co.za has forums and such to help out with that sort of thing. (They're also run by the same people who hold the ICON tabletop games convention in South Africa each year.) Probably a good idea to check them out if you're interested, since that's where I found the people I played my first Pathfinder campaign with. There's also an online "Wiki" for the base game, so all you internet savants can go check out some of the things people come up with for their campaigns.
(As an afterthought, if you do decide to play DnD, dodge 4th edition for your first campaign, it's combat rules are fairly draconian compared to the other editions.)
The other system I know about is a somewhat more... obscure game called Mage: The Ascension that was created by White Wolf; who are now owned by the CCP Games, the Iceland based creators of the MMO EVE online. (Again, an article for another time.) I say game, but in technicality there were many that were more or less the same thing, but spun in different directions for the game "universe" that White Wolf created, known as the "World of Darkness". Perhaps one of the most popular, (yet still fairly obscure), videogames based on the World of Darkness was Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines; which was again itself based on the ruleset for Vampire: The Masquerade. However, the tabletop rules I know of are for Mage: The Ascension, for one simple reason. That game is fucking cool. (Excuse the expletive, that's how cool it is.) Based on the aforementioned "GURPS" gaming system, these rulesets from White Wolf ranged on everything from Vampires to Werewolves, Regular Humans and Mages, to Fey and various other creatures, all as playable characters; and, for the more adventurous Storytellers, able to be used all together. Cool as that is, it is Mage: The Ascension that is of the most interest to me.
Mage: The Ascension takes the idea of doing anything you can imagine, and literally pushes it to it's limits. While I did say that these Tabletop Roleplaying Games are only limited to your imagination, I should add that there are the bounds of the rules for obvious reasons. A game is not a game without rules that everyone agrees to play by. Here's the thing, Dungeons and Dragons is pretty awesome, but depending on your tastes, slightly limited. It's great for it's medieval high fantasy and ease of access to new players, but for people looking for something more, things like it's magic are completely limited, and using it in a modern setting does make things difficult and confusing. The World of Darkness setting and Mage: Ascension has the opposite issues. It's modern, and it's rules are so broad that for the inexperienced, it can be overwhelming. (Damn it Greg, explain better.) Consider this: in Dungeons and Dragons, you get the "Magic Missile" spell that shoots three bolts of magic, everytime, the same way, every time you use it. Seems cool, but you would expect magic to be more freeform than that.
Mage: The Ascension takes that idea, and runs with it. While it makes place for what they call "Rotes", the focus of the game is based around the concept of molding reality to ones will. The rules don't detail spells and their effects, they talk about spheres of magic, and what kind of things can be done at various levels of expertise in them. A character who knows the Sphere of life can manipulate all things related to life, seeing life visually, to healing the injured, to eventually even outright snuffing it out or creating it with the click of his fingers. A character that knows the Sphere of Entropy can see the strings of fate about him, and begin to play with them as he carries gains more expertise, forcing normal dice to always roll sixes, or causing the supports of a wall to fail, bringing the rubble onto those nearby. Sounds fairly mystical no? And the best part is, it truly is limited by your imagination. (and your characters expertise within the rules obviously.) Anything from guns that never run out of ammo to time travel is possible within the rules of this game. So I'd say that's pretty awesome no?
Warning: The Next Paragraph contains heavy fanboyism. Read at your own risk.
I should point out that you've probably heard of a similar sounding game or two. Firstly, Magic: The Gathering and Mage: The Ascension are two separate things, the former being a card game by Wizards of the Coast. Secondly, Mage: The Ascension is in technicality a discontinued version of what became Mage: The Awakening, a reboot by White Wolf again. I'm gonna be blunt about this, though you're free to have a different opinion. Mage: The Ascenion = Awesome. Mage: The Awakening = Garbage. The technicalities being the Mage: The Awakening took some perfectly reasonable, sensible and just plain cool ideas, and trivialized them for ease of play, while ruining the idea in the process. Not saying it's a bad game, but in my personal opinion, it can't hold a candle to Mage: The Ascension.
The Danger has passed.
Oh yes, I mentioned that Mage: The Ascension was an old, obscure and rebooted game. You're might be wondering how you would get your hands on the rules and such for this game then. Thank goodness for DriveThruRPG, an online, print on demand service who offer the printing and delivering of all the related game materials for Mage: The Ascension, it's brother games, and even other games like Dungeons and Dragons if you're struggling to find them. A handy service to be sure. (And if I'm not mistaken, you can even just buy the PDF's of these books from them at a steal.)
In any case, before I decide to further carry on about how cool Mage: The Ascension is, I should wrap the article up. If you think I should shut-up about Mage, or maybe talk about/try out another gaming system, make sure to let me know in the comments below... Otherwise, I can't know now can I? Also, be sure to share this with any of your bored/nerdy friends out there, maybe they'll find something to like in this veritable wall of text. And of course, if you would like to see more articles likes this one, make sure to like my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the right. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this and that I have redeemed myself for my lack of a proper article yesterday, hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again tomorrow.
Farewell adventurers. Safe Travels.
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