The day arrived, and sat amongst a glut of player handbooks, PDF files, web sites and character sheets, I wound myself up into a state of frothy panic. The last time I did proper pen and paper roleplaying was when I was in my early teens. About 20 odd years ago. And even then the Dungeon Master (DM) had coaxed most of the numbers and details out for me. So my Dungeons and Dragons experience was very rusty to say the least. Obviously I've played many an RPG since, PC based mainly, Massive Multiplayer a-plenty. But you see a lot of the mechanics of combat and spellcasting are all done for you. You learn the progression paths, but you don't know the numbers down to the modifiers. Or at least I don't. So, here I was, invited into a long standing campaign (the players involved had been playing together for around a year, every week), with only a vague grasp of some of the intracacies of the process. Once again, panic took over, so much to learn, so much to remember, so much confusion. Just calculating my Base Attack Bonus became a quagmir of anxiety. My main concern was turning up, and being unprepared, coming across as a bumbling old fool without the first clue of playing a pen and paper game. I didn't want to upset their flow, with my ineptitude.
Luckily, I should have remembered the key fact that the DM is there to coach his players who are unsure, to help them along, and during the myriad of processes he was involved with, he managed to throw some tips and information my way to keep me on the correct path. About 30 minutes into the game, with our introductions and story settings in place, I'd found my stride. The off-the-cuff-banter is where I like to think I shine. I love waxing flowery about a storyline, and interacting in character. Thats my thing. The combat and character progression is there to serve the situations and interactions rather than become the main focus to the game. So with very little in the way of number crunching or dice rolling, we'd set off on a journey and the characters had already formed bonds and alliances that could become the stories in themselves. I thought to myself, "after many years trying to find this sort of experience in numerous MMO's, all failing to some extent, this is where my Holy Grail lies". I guess its sort of like masturbating with your imagination. Where theres enough time to soak in situations and react in a thoughtful and well versed way. Even the action can go at the pace of the story. That's not to say it was taken at a pedestrian pace, theres plenty going on, it's just you have your turn, and you can make it as brief or as elaborate as you want. The emphasis is on you, to create something from what is available. That's what I love.
The Fantasy Grounds (FG) client performed very well, with its lifelike representation of a tabletop, with the rollable dice, and the reference documents, and maps and even top-down miniature like tokens. You can propose movement, by dragging your token to where you want to be and the DM approves it, so it does represent quite a communal tabletop. Very impressive indeed. Your character sheets are all stored on the server, but have local copies for you to view. You drag modifiers direct from the character sheets to add to your dice rolls. Your dice are as close a representation to the physical die that I can imagine. Just roll them onto the chat box to have your result plus modifier included in the displayed result. You can setup attack modifiers in your hotbar and just drag them onto the modifier stack, you can setup common rolls (without using the dice) by entering them as a command, and dragging the command to the hotbar. You can write notes on a notepad and then share them with all the other players. Very useful for a brief paragraph describing your character, if you are new to the party. The chat modes are there for in character, out of character and action/emotes. Allowing you to finely tune and embelish your movement and attack actions with descriptive text, along with mood and emotives. You can even draw on the map (if the DM allows it) to explain something to the group, or show where an area of effect spell may land. Tokens are easily scaled to the maps and they follow the scaling when the map is zoomed. Character portraits and supporting story documents are all shared via the client effectively. I'm looking forward to the upcoming release of version 2.0 of the FG client, with its updated interface and new functionality.
By the end of the evening, after 4 and half hours of play (with about half an hour of preparation beforehand) we'd brought two parties of adventurers together, introduced each other, and formed some bonds across the divide from new players and old players. We'd set off on a journey through an underground labyrinth in the hope of reaching a dark elf stronghold to thwart the plans of a Vampire there who was building an army to opress the surrounding lands. In the caverns we'd encountered a horde of trolls who we had to defeat, and then found that they were only servants to a wyrm. Defiant yet terrified our party was stood facing off against a dragon, when we had to close the session, till next week. As you can tell, I'm still buzzing with the excitement generated by the game. And I'm much more at ease with the idea of throwing a few dice to keep the adventure ticking over.
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