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After a long hiatus, my best friend and I finally managed to resurrect our D&D game. Late last fall, we started talking about how we both played D&D growing up, and how much we enjoyed it. When the conversation turned to why we stopped playing, it soon became apparent that it wasn’t because we tired of the game… It seems like life just catches up with you. It starts with college, where classes and homework consume your time, and whatever free moments you have left need to be spent swilling cheap beer right from the pitcher until you pass out cold. Then, after college comes work, which is followed by more work, and then marriage, which is followed shortly thereafter by kids, which makes you long for the days for drinking the beer right from the pitcher.

But I digress. The real point is that grown-up life leaves precious little time for lugging all of your books to your best friend’s house and taking over their kitchen table for a Friday evening. Not to mention that such activity would open up your nerdish little chamber of secrets for your wife’s full perusal. I’ll be the first to admit it – I’m a nerd, but, I’m a closet nerd. I have worked long and hard to push all that nerdish exuberance down deep and surround it with the bland veneer of a suburbanite professional. One night of rolling dice on the kitchen table, and that’s all gone You can't un-ring that bell, my friend.

Yet, the more we discussed the possibility of resurrecting “the game” the more the siren’s call affected us. And then, as if a divine answer to our lowly petitions, a solution was delivered unto us. In a newsletter from RPGNow.com they mentioned several programs for playing d20 games over the internet. I went out and grabbed demos for all of them, but quickly fell in love with a tool called Fantasy Grounds. Basically, Fantasy Grounds is a “virtual tabletop” for d20 games. It has everything you would have if you all at the kitchen table: Character sheets, modules and maps can all be managed in the client, and it also comes with reference material for monsters, classes, spells, etc. (all taken from the d20 SRD).

Most importantly, it comes with dice. Taking the virtual tabletop metaphor to its ultimate conclusion, FG includes a full set of virtual D&D dice – and yes, you can choose the color of your dice. Where most of the game clients have random number generators, in Fantasy Grounds you actually pick up your dice and roll them with a twitch of the mouse. They tumble across you desktop, spinning and bouncing before landing on their ultimate result, which is then broadcast to the other players. My first reaction was that it was completely unnecessary chrome – a vanity feature that the developers threw in as a marketing gimmick. Now I realize just how critical actually rolling the dice is to the experience. You’ve never hear anyone say “Yeah! I just randomly generated a 20!”

The game itself is fantastic. As much as I love a good CRPG like World of Warcraft or Oblivion, nothing compares to the depth and flexibility of old school pen and paper gaming. You can go anywhere, do anything, and often adventures take you places that neither the players nor the DM ever expected to go. We’ve seen our fortunes change on a failed skill check, launching whole mini-adventures as you brave party must now deal with a whole chain of calamities. We are just now crossing the threshold of third level, and these characters already have an incredible sense of history that surrounds them. When a PnP session goes right, the experience is almost transcendent.

Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, Eberron, RPGs