Today’s #RPGaDAY question: which RPG have I played the most this past year? Well, that’s Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. We’ve been playing through the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign setting most weeks, a few hours at a time for over a year now, but the cracks are starting to show in the product (and game system) and, well, I’m just hoping we’ll finish soon and move onto something else.
Before the new edition of D&D came out, I was done with the fantasy genre. I hated the complexity of third edition D&D (and 3.5 and Pathfinder) and fourth edition just wasn’t anything that I would have considered “fun”. The only option I was looking at for fantasy role-playing was the Dragon Age RPG, which seemed to take forever to publish set 3, the upper-level ruleset, but I know that was a significant delay due to licensing approvals. We would have been playing that if the licensor would have approved the game in a more speedy fashion. I am confident in thinking the delays in the approval process was what prompted Green Ronin to develop the IP-stripped Fantasy AGE game. However, 5th Edition came out before Dragon Age‘s last book was released and, unlike the previous iterations of the game, 5e played quickly and was actually good for what it tried to do!
That Dragon Age episode, I particularly didn’t like. It’s an awesome example of what happens when you don’t have a social contract or good buy-in to the game you’re about to play. Pramas brings a dark fantasy game, Hardwick wants to play goofy fun dorkiness, and Wheaton just wants to have fun with his friends. After Hardwick describes his character as Fonzie, whose goal is to sleep with every woman in the setting, there’s a cut to Pramas diplomatically talking about how every group has a player like this. ((Which is complete BS, but this is a show, so rather than scream out in frustration, Chris Pramas takes the high road.)) It’s an amazingly awful start to an episode that several people believe is a good example of gaming. When I mentioned this on Google Plus, one of the responses was, “it felt like Hardwick was mocking my favorite hobby. It really was not fun to watch.” I agree.