State of Playing

Ladies and Gentlemen, here we are, 2023. Another year in the books, and time, I suppose, to cast an eye backwards, regarding the games played and posts written and all else game related. Which this year I suppose should start with lamentations re lack of posts - I mean - 2? That is sad. I have things to say! Heavens.

All right. State of play from 2022:

We participated in 4 ongoing campaigns. The Icewind Dale game continues apace, every Thursday, the group now has maintained that schedule since 2018; we'll hit 5 years soon. We kept it up through the pandemic (online) and have survived a good deal of turnover, and are still at it. For all that, I can't say it has been an unqualified success - some of those WOTC adventure paths are troublesome. Wander in the wilderness for 5 levels, then catch the train to the end - or don't catch the train, and wander pointlessly - yeah. Blame WOTC. Add in some murder hoboing and things can go sideways. But it goes. It managed to generate some decided high points - a wild mage rolling the 01 and surging for a minute straight in the middle of a fight; two of us dimension dooring on top of a dragon to attack it; in a later fight, the same two dimension dooring into a bucket with a mad Duergar, who we then dumped into his own forge. Also, using rust monsters as blowtorches to get through an iron door - and the wild mage summoning a unicorn. It's had its moments. 

The Saltmarsh game reached an interesting stopping point, a massive fight that promised total party wipe but did not deliver, and then the DM decided he wanted to play, so we are playing Call of the Netherdeep now. The group is a good one, but the game is a slog, and I can't bring myself to care about Critical Role and its offshoots. And Sundays are harder to keep clear than Thursdays - this one is very hard to keep on a schedule. If Sundays are hard, Saturdays are even worse, so though the Tomb of Annihilation game has had some good stretches again this year, it has also disappeared for 6 months at a time. We have been playing that adventure path since 2018 - we've gotten through about 2/3 of that one book. Yikes. Still - the Saltmarsh game gave us an epic battle with a water elemental that we survived from the sorcerer making three straight strength saves and the druid rolling a 20 on her death save. That was fun.

And that is all the D&D we have played, other than poking the play tests. This year has been given to other games. We played Traveller a lot at the beginning of the year, learning it, and a bunch of the elements that can go into it - but then got interested in Call of Cthulhu. We started that one playing some impromptu scenarios, but found some cool characters and a scenario, and ran a decent campaign for a few weeks. More Hardy Boys than Lovecraft so far, but very entertaining, with some great characters, some nifty situations, and a string of torched cars. (In this game and others we have in fact managed to ignite a stalled truck, a wrecked car, another wrecked car, after someone tried to run us off the road and succeeded and running everyone off the road. We probably should stop trying to push drive auto rolls and mechanical repairs.) his went along fine, until One D&D came out - that interrupted us, and since a lot of it was improvised, kind of stalled it out completely. Still: we've played a couple other scenarios and are about to set forth on a tomb-raiding adventure in Egypt (very Pulp Cthulhu, I have to say), so this is going well.

And? We played around with Cyberpunk Red, making characters anyway, and looked over a few other games (Monster of the Week, for instance.) But haven't played them.

Okay. So back to the monster in the room, D&D, One D&D, WOTC and Hasbro ha ha! Well - it's the monster in the world; here, not so much. We are playing those ongoing campaigns - but those are mostly outside the house. At home, we have barely touched D&D. We played a couple fights, and when the playtests started, we dove in. But their returns have diminished. The first one, we downloaded and rad and argued about and made up characters and played them through two or three scenes, and hashed out the results and waited desperately for the survey and filled it out and waited for the next batch of rules - and waited - and waited. When they finally came out, we downloaded, read, argued, played, analyzed and when the survey came out, filled it in - and got more and more annoyed at the whole process. Way too long between rules releases, surveys that left out major rules changes, and just general drabness about the whole affair.

In the wider world, it seems people have stopped caring all that much about the rules and are more interested in arguing about the OGL and the prospect that Hasbro might want to make money on the game. And how they might try to make money on the game. That is a subject I could have opinions about, but I don't know if I do. What I have seen doesn't seem all that awful - a new OGL that charges for anyone making above a certain amount on their derivative products - that's not angst inducing. On the other hand, WOTC's reassurances that the OGL doesn't cover things like Roll20 are not as reassuring as they sound. That means Roll20 has its own license, one that can be revoked, presumably - right? So even if the OGL remains, there's no guarantee that you will be able to play D&D online anywhere other than D&D Beyond. That seems like madness, but who knows? 

None of it is likely to matter to me, not for a while. At the moment, I am not keen on playing D&D at all. When I am, I have all these old books and can play them to my heart's content. If those outside games don't switch, I guess I won't switch. 

Still... let me end on a more positive note. At the core of One D&D is in fact a new system. And so far, as far as I can see, it is fine. Will it be backward compatible? WOTC likes to say it will - probably in the end, it will diverge enough that people will likely choose between them. Right now, though, the new version looks like a collection of house rules - some better, some worse than what exists now, nothing to either force you to change or make you refuse to change. I don't know if that will last - or if it can last. WOTC will need people to buy new books to make this worth while. They will need to give you a reason to play the new game, to spend money on new stuff, and a bunch of somewhat more extreme versions of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything might not do it. But when the new stuff comes I don't think it is going to ruin the game. Even the digital stuff is not likely to ruin everything - Hasbro will find ways to make more money, and if there is money to be made, they will get it, and if other companies can get it too, they will pay their licensing fees, and everyone will - do what they will do.

As for me? This year, I expect to play mostly Pulp Cthulhu - at least to run Pulp Cthulhu. I'll keep playing the D&D I am playing now, maybe less enthusiastically, but it's still fine. And if anything interesting comes along from WOTC, I might give it a try. But right now, I think I need to work on some ancient Egyptian horrors for the crew to run into.