davidklecha | Gaming in the 21st Century (Reply)

Back when I was a wee little tyke, I heard much about the evils of Dungeons & Dragons. When I got to high school, I knew some dudes at school who were kind of into it (and very smart and mostly well-adjusted, so I started having my doubts about the evil-ness of it). The bast part of that arrangement was one of them lent me this supplemental book which featured a bunch of clever (and occasionally hilarious) traps that the person running the game could insert into their adventures. My favorite happened to be one called the “Kareem Abdul Jabbar Trap” (or something to that effect). It involved a giant hand-shaped catapult launching the unwitting player, skyhook-like, into a distant basket.

Hilarious.

Anyway, as a result of the bad press D&D got, I didn’t really get into it until about a year or so ago. I’d started pen-and-paper RPGs about two years ago when my friend Jay finally took a hint and invited me to his Thursday night game. From that broke off a smaller group that met every other Saturday night (or so), with me, Jay, and our friend Sarah, who we both met through the Thursday night gig. That’s where I got my first actual introduction to D&D, and was having a ball for months…

…until Sarah finally gave up on the Michigan economy and moved to Arizona.

So, since we wanted to keep playing, we started hunting down ways to keep playing online. For now, we’ve got this cobbled-together system of OpenRPG and Skype, which works okay, but could be tons better.

Enter D&D 4th Edition:

How extremely cool is that? I don’t think it’s mentioned in the video (which was shown at GenCon, and thus I am WAY behind the curve on this), but rumor has it there’s going to be voice support, as well. It’s kind of funny, though, it’s likely they made this just for us. I know they didn’t… it’s obviously an issue for a lot of people. But to have something that sort of meets in the middle, between the insane-yet-convenient MMORPG and the increasingly difficult to organize tabletop game, and built by the game designers themselves, that’s pretty cool.

What would be really cool is if they licensed the framework on which its built to other game developers so they could hang their own systems and artwork on it, and break open internet-based, tabletop-style gaming.

I’d find it cool, anyway. You might not agree.