Re: Good news for all d&d fans
It was the grids and things that put a lot of people off D&D. I used to play 3rd edition myself, which was far more basic as regards combat, however a lot of people thought wizards of the coast were basically doing a power grab in order to release miniatures and such and have the game more structured around going into a formal game shop rather than just getting together with friends.
Mostly the rp I've done was in the superhero version of D&D, that mutants and masterminds, where combat was more freeform, or in other systems like 7th sea.
As regards the numbers, if your not having too many rules most of maths is relatively easy and no worse than you'd get in a game of snakes and ladders, for example, you'd already know from your character chart that your defense might be 7, so if you get attacked the gm would tell you how likely the attack was to avoid, and you'd then roll a d20 and add 7 and see if you rolled more than the attack.
Ditto with hits.
In terms of games, a computer game can never replicate what you can do with a tabletop game, a good gm is dynamic.
Firstly this means the gm can theme the game around their players, and thus put in all the npcs, from miner shopkeepers to love interests or friends of your characters. Secondly, it means the gm can adapt to what their players do.
for example in one game we played, we found a conspiracy going on in an mansion and actually decided alerting the authorities was a good idea, so started walking off into the woods to get to the next town where there was an army camp, a good idea until the gm decided we'd get attacked on the way and beaten up enough to need a doctor.
Also, because the game is dynamic, the stuff you can do in combat is limited only by your imagination of what your characters can do with their abilities, not by a program.
For instance, in one game we played, I was a fate witch, a girl who could tweak people's luck. This made me great in social situations, and in preparing before battles, but didn't actually make me fantastic in combat since my abilities were limited.
So when we went down into the underground tunnels to take out a bunch of shambling vampires, while everyone else fought the vampire henchmen who'd come out to deal with us, I took an oil lamp and laid a burning trail of oil across the mouth of the tunnel leading to the crypt where all the vampire minions were, so that we didn't have a massive bunch of undead interrupting us mid battle .
This is also why I'm less a fan of the grids and miniatures idea, since the rules should exist to help the players come up with creative and interesting fights, not work like a wargame.
Then again of course a lot of this is academic, since sadly our gm had a baby so the games had to stop, and we've not been able to find anyone running anything at all in this part of the country since we moved.
yee gods I miss our weekly rp sessions, particularly since Mrs. Dark hasn't done very much but absolutely loves the idea.
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