D_W

So I was really excited for this game.

My initial impressions after about a half an hour however have left me feeling pretty disappointed. This game is gorgeous. Great art, great sound design. However I'm not so sure about the combat. It feels really sluggish. There's a ton of animation priority on everything. You can't cancel out of your dash with your attack or vice versa. You can't dash through enemies so its super easy to get boxed in. You can't dash through bullets either. The respawning animation takes like 20 seconds. It's rough and feels awful. EDIT: having played more of it.. Ehhh.. if you're on the fence about this game, maybe pass it up. Despite looking nice, it's super rough around the edges.

What has been your experience so far?

Apparently, according to the devs, they messed something up with the controls in the release build and are looking to fix it. So you might want to hold off for a couple of days before it gets sorted out. It's a damn shame, but at least they're not like "What are you talking about? This game plays perfectly!"

I've updated the OP slightly to include a bit about sharing tabletop stories.

Here's some of mine:
While playing DnD 4e with my younger brothers. One of them wanted to be a changling (basically a race of shapeshifters) so I let him because that's pretty cool. Then when they were sneaking up to a hobgoblin encampment he rolled very welcome on an insight check and learned the name of some hobgoblin leader. He then decided to shapeshift into that leader and proceeded to infiltrate the camp while the rest of the party was busy fighting goblins. It was one my first time GMing but I ran with it and he ended up keeping the leader from discovering all of his soldiers were dead until it was too late.

A bad time I had was when I was in another 4e game with a GM that was a bit too much of a rule lawyer. My character was in a pit and had to roll to climb up 30 feet of rope. In the stated rules you have to make a strength check every 10 feet. Well I rolled a natural 20 on the first 10 and expected to just be up at the top because, y'know, it's a crit. No. He had me roll for each and I swear increased the DC each time for whatever reason. Boooo... So I ended up back in the pit and took way too much falling damage.

@artisanbreads: You should definitely check out the Campaign podcast then. It can be very silly but Edge of the Empire is an interesting system that works surprisingly well in podcast form.

@yi_orange: Those are some great tips and additions to games.

Something else I should have mentioned was if you know a group of people and want to GM but can't really come up with stuff then stuff from the One Page Dungeon Contest is a good source.

Hey Duders,

A recent guest column by Quinn Murphy is all about the "gap" between tabletop games (particularly RPGs) and video games and there was chatter about how to even get into playing tabletop games. So I figured a thread educating folks on games to play and where to play 'em would be useful. I'm going to assume reading this have at least some knowledge about the genre or have read that article, but feel free to ask any questions!

Where to play

A lot of tabletop games just require a group of people talking and usually some dice. All you need is some sort of voice software like Mumble, Teamspeak, Discord, or Skype(yuck!). I recommend Discord since it's free, browser based, and doesn't seem to mess up as much or in bizarre ways like Skype.

Dice rollers can be found online but one you often see used in play-by-post style games is Orokos.com since you can link to individual rolls and make sure folks are being honest.

Roll20.net is a site that allows all-in-one solution. It provides various GM tools, maps, character sheets, dice rolls, in-built voice/video chat (though it's not great!), etc. It's pretty much your best solution if you want to play tabletop rpgs.

What to play

There's a ton of different types games on the market right now. You don't just have to be slaughtering invading orcs in a high fantasy setting anymore (though to be honest there's always been a variety.) Nor do you have deal with bloated rulesets that require fiddling with adding all sorts of stats and bonus to overcome some arbitrary difficulty class. Here's some suggestions:

Dungeon World - This is a "Powered by the Apocalypse" game (meaning it's a hack of a game called Apocalypse World.) It's DnD high fantasy without all the bloat of DnD's ruleset. All rolls other than damage are 2d6. It's very easy to pick up and play. You could probably learn it over a single session. It also has a pretty active community that makes custom classes and supplements such as Inverse World. It's my current jam.

Strike! - Strike is a setting agnostic game where the rolls are all based on a single d6. It's sort of modular with mechanics that can be used or ignored depending on the style of game you want to play. It still has a tactical grid base combat if that's your thing, but streamlines it a lot so it doesn't take 4 hours to get through one encounter.

FATE - Another setting agnostic game. FATE uses fudge dice instead of standard d6s and I don't really know much about it other than that!

What about games that you can play in a single sitting?

Fiasco - I've not played it myself, but I've heard nothing but good things and always enjoyed it when it was played in a podcast. The type of game depends on the module you're playing and is not as free-form as some other systems.

Law's Out - This is a diceless spaghetti western game. Each player takes on the roll of a character in a western movie and has different assets they can bid to take control of a scene.

Goblin Quest - This is a game about playing a group of goblins and probably dying in horrible but hilarious ways.

What do I need to play these games?

Not much other than a mic and a few hours. A lot of games have player guides that can be as small as 1 to 2 pages and are often free. If you're GMing then you obviously should own the book and be able to explain the rules.

What if I just want to listen to other people have fun?

You'd be looking for an Actual Play podcast then. There's tons of them out there. Here's some I like:

Friend At the Table - GM'd by our own Austin Walker, FaTT is a bit of an outlier in the Actual Play realm. It has a more actively serious tone and is more like a drama than comedy. It's also really fucking good. The first season's audio is a bit rough at the start, but gets better.

The Adventure Zone - The McElroy family plays DnD 5e and occasionally almost competently! It's really funny and really well produced.

OneShot / Campaign - This is put on by a bunch of Chicago improv comedians primarily. Their oneshots are one session looks at various tabletop rpgs. Their campaign is set in the Star Wars universe and uses the Edge Of The Empire system. Campaign is fantastic. It's very entertaining and character focused. There are whole episodes were they don't roll a single dice and poke a lot of fun at Star Wars EU stuff, but it's always a lot of fun.

Six Feats Under - This is run by a group of mostly Something Awful Let's Players. They've been running a game of The 13th Age for years and are getting pretty close to finishing up. They also do a lot of one-shot episodes and is how I've come to know about a lot of games I wouldn't otherwise. (disclosure: I occasionally do music for them.)

Just remember it's not a real Actual Play podcast until one of the player characters loses a hand.

I wanna play!

Cool. That's what this thread is for. While I'd love to put together a Dungeon World game (even if it was just small one-off stuff), anyone is welcome to use this thread to find others to play something together. Just post what you're interested in and when.

Let me tell you what happened one time!

If you have any stories from experiences you've had playing tabletop rpgs feel free to share them. Good or Bad, or whatever.

@spaceinsomniac: Yeah. I know.

SpawnOnMe is one of my favorite non-giantbomb gaming podcasts and their newest episode they had David Jaffe on. It's a really fucking good interview.

http://spawnon.me/spawn-podcast-95-drawn-jaffe/

Who knew the creator of Twisted Metal's favorite genre of music would be top 40 pop? Outside of that there's some real interesting discussion on about the lack of diversity in game studio and it's causes.

If you're not familiar with that podcast I think you could describe the tone as sort of like if the Beascast more actively talked about social issues and politics. So expect serious and interesting discussions punctuated with silly banter.

@alex_carrillo: We just need a game that combines them. A trippy teen drama set in the PNW that involves a group of teens road tripping from Walla Walla WA to Seattle.

@htr10:Yeah it's a horror adventure game. (Very light story premise spoilers) There's some time traveling elements to the story, but it's mainly a ghost story. It's not really spooky. There's no monsters that chase you. It's more psychological in that sense and does a pretty good job with that. It controls like a platformer (minus a jump) but is an adventure game it the modern sense. It's similar to Life Is Strange a bit, but the main gimmick involves a hand radio. But there's dialogue choices and those choices alter the story a bit. I'm not sure to what end though as I've only played through the game once.

I could see Patrick loving this game actually. It's definitely up his alley.

@humanity: I spent about 4 to 5 hours to finish it. I didn't get all the collectables however and there seems to be a lot of secrets and incentive to play through multiple times. The art is real nice and has some really awesome visual effects when things get weird. And they get real weird. The soundtrack and sound design are real well done too.

So I just completed this game and enjoyed quite a bit. It's a nice addition to trippy teen drama set in the PNW genre of games that seems to be popping up. I do hope there's a quick look. I think a lot of the staff would enjoy it.

Has anyone else played it yet? If so what did you think?