RPS Feature Tabling a motion
I’ve recently started playing with a new Dungeons & Dragons group, drafted in after one of their numbers upped and left town. It’s my second time playing table-top D&D, after a splendid stint a couple of years back with Jim Rossignol (late of this parish) DMing, and it’s a properly good time. And what I’ve learned is that it becomes a much better time the more flaws you introduce to your character. Which got me thinking: wow, do PC RPGs not follow that rule at all.
Not 100% relevant to PC gaming, but 1) D&D’s rules have been enormously influential on computer RPGs 2) whatever the new edition ends up doing will almost certainly filter down to a PC game or six at some point 3) your mum.
Wizards of the Coast are taking another pass at Dungeons & Dragons, after the recent fourth edition rules proved more than a little divisive. Divisive = MASSIVE RAGEFEST, of course. On top of that, WOTC reckon vidjagames are taking an increasingly deadly bite out of their side. So, they want to get D&D back on track – and they’re actively looking for the community’s input to do so. Is that you? Ooh, probably.
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The most exciting news in the last 24 hours has nothing to do with PC games. And yet it still feels like it does. HBO have revealed the first fifteen minutes of their adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s Song Of Ice & Fire series, in the form of Game Of Thrones. And it looks utterly flipping excellent. (Warning: the clip stops before showing tiny wolf cubs. Boo.)
What has that to do with Atari and Bedlam’s Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale? Almost nothing, other than the word “Daggerdale” awakens the same dying flame of my interest in the fantasy genre as “Winterfell”. It makes me want to read the books my dad would leave by the toilet when I was a kid. But the game? It’s the up-to-four-player co-op action RPG that Quintin lamented not seeing enough combat for last year. Well, now there’s a trailer entirely dedicated to fighting.
It’s been a few years since I’ve been an avid Pen & Paper Tabletop roleplayer. Like – say- about sixteen or so. However, I’ve dabbled sporadically ever since and have tried to keep an occasional eye on the hobby, if only for old time’s sake. So I was aware that Wizards of the Coast had announced they were releasing a fourth edition of the D&D rules next year.
It wasn’t until someone who’d been following it a little closer talked to me about it last week that I realised it actually was something genuinely radical. Buried between the announcements of Swords Versus Scarabs +3 now being +4 and kobolds being pink rather than whatever colour kobolds are, Wizards have done something interesting and relevant to RPS.
They’ve turned it into a PC game.
