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Sunday Comics: Dead Island In the nearly 40 years since the release of the original edition of the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper role-playing game, various publishers have released many different versions of the game, pleasing new players and alienating old ones on a fairly regular basis. Now Wizards of the Coast is working on the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and they want to please all of the elven people all of the time.
BioWare is giving players a whole new old way to experience Dragon Age: Origins, announcing a pen and paper role-playing game based in the Dragon Age universe.
Are gamers today being denied the social love of good-old pen and paper role-playing games?
Maybe.
I only recently got back into the swing of things (and took some matters into my own hands), and I’m currently running a D&D 3.5 Edition game with a few mates every third Saturday or so.
Okay, that’s a lie. We’ve had one session. But enthusiasm is super high.
There was the temptation, for a moment, to craft the campaign in something like NWN or NWN2, and do the whole thing online. And yes, it’s social, but not the sort of social I, and indeed my mates, were looking for. There’s something about scrawling hit points and gold piece counts on a slip of paper that no keyboard or mouse can replicate.
Of course, computers can keep track of all that annoying number stuff, like weapon bonuses and esoteric modifiers to saving throws. With the complicated mechanics hidden away, there’s the potential to focus more on the story and characters.
Both have their pros and cons. I was once pretty sold on CRPGs, and I think there will be a point in the future where it can truly compete with PnP, but for now, the pen is mightier than the DWORD. I hope someone got that.
Now, I put the question to you: PnP RPG or computer RPG? Which do you think is superior and why?
PS. And yes, that is Firefly‘s Nathan Fillion with dice in hand, about to engage his warp drive into a nebula of hardcore nerdism.
