Tyler and I have both mentioned before that we’re avid
“Table Top Gamers” multiple times on the show, and some of you may be
wondering, what does that really mean?
Board Games are played on a Table Top, but so are poker, games like
Magic the Gathering, Warhammer 40,000 and one could even think we were
referring to Pool in certain contexts.
While I believe we both have at least some interest in all of the above,
what we’re really referring to is Table Top RPGs.
Some of you may still be asking; what’s a Table Top RPG?
Well, the prime example, and the short hand for most people in the hobby is
Dungeons and Dragons but it goes far beyond that, and to many people, Dungeons and Dragons is an old
game with a stigma they don’t want to be associated with. For others, it’s the entirety of the hobby,
and while they’re aware of other games and may have played one once or twice,
they really just want to play D&D for the rest of their lives.
But I still haven’t gotten to what a Table Top RPG is or why
anyone would want to play one or how they relate to videogames. One thing me and my partner in crime share is
a predilection towards rambling. Perhaps
I should start with how I got into the hobby.
I believe it started with a certain episode of Dexter’s Lab. That said, I feel like I knew that the
episode was a parody D&D even when I saw it, so it may just be one of those
things I always knew about and assumed everyone did, like how if you blow into
NES carts they work again, or that there are three different Robins
(Well 5 now. 6 if you count Carrie Kelly 4 if you don’t count
Stephanie Brown. Technically three again now because…. Comics are weird, let's leave it at that.)
But I didn’t seek the game out right away… for one, I didn’t
have a lot of friends, and while the ones I did have were nerdy, they weren’t
that nerdy, and while D&D isn’t that complex, we were probably too young to
play it right at the time. Instead, like
every kid in the 90s, I got into Pokemon.
And the Pokemon Card Game. Which
lead me to the Dragon Ball Z Card Game.
Our Friendly Local Gaming Store had Dragon Ball Z card game tournaments
every week. And after each tournament,
one of the older kids would run a quick session of the Dragon Ball Z RPG. If it sounds terrible, it’s because it
was. We’d all chose a DBZ character, I
was usually stuck with Chiaotzu because even Krillin was taken, but despite his special attack being to blow himself up, he was
still better than Yamcha. Every week we’d run the same battle, the “Z Fighters” Vs. Nappa, Vageta and
some Saibamen. Unlike a traditional RPG,
with a game master controlling the opponents and an ongoing story, this was
just that same fight, and when we had a lot of people, players would play the
bad guys as well (though I still rarely got to play a character like Gohan or
Piccolo and was stuck with Chiaotzu.)
This might sound like it sucks if you’re familiar with Table
Top RPGs already. And to be honest, it
kind of did, the rule system for the old game is absolutely terrible. But I loved Dragon Ball Z, so playing out the
game’s classic adventures. What
fascinated me far more though, was when the person running the games told me
about how there were rules to make your own characters and adventures, and I
begged my mom to get me the rule book for Christmas. When she finally did, I studied the thing,
and luckily all of my friends were huge Dragon Ball Z fans, so it wasn’t hard
to convince them to make characters, and I told my own stories. Now they all followed the typical Dragon Ball
Z plot, an Alien with a terrible Pun for a name and his followers attacked
Earth and defeated the heroes, the heroes trained and became stronger, fought
the alien again and won, then went and found the Dragon Balls so they could
bring back anyone who died. Rinse and
repeat until we got bored and made new characters, and eventually until we’d
broken the subpar system to the point where the game was boring enough that we
just quit completely.
And the DBZ card game didn’t hold up much longer, the old
tournament players went to other games, mostly Lord of the Rings which was the
flavor of the month at the time, but I ended up playing a game called
Yu-gi-oh. It had Dragons, warriors,
wizards and monsters, and Trap Cards, everything a kid my age could want. And I met new friends, one of which was
always carrying around a notebook. When
I asked him what was in it, he said he was statting out Yu-gi-oh cards to be
used as monsters and enemies in his Dungeons and Dragons game. My mind was blown. My birthday was coming up, and as soon as I
got my birthday money I bought a Players Hand Book. I didn’t even want to use Yu-gi-oh monsters
in my own games, just the fact that you could, that the game had so much
available, had me hooked.
I didn’t even wait to own a Dungeon Masters Guide or Monster
Manual, the other two “core” rule books of D&D to get started. I knew the basics of how DMing worked and how
to make monsters, and I had a few friends willing to play. While Video Games and anime were huge
influences on my early DMing, the memories from the Dragon Ball Z game filtered
in as well, and my games always had a story… even if they were 10% story and
90% dungeon as things went on.
Eventually, I found a Star Wars RPG book, and we tried that and found it
just as fun.
What does this have to do with Videogames though? Well not a lot, but it’s very important to
the creation of this podcast. When I
left for college, I could never get a group together willing to try D&D or
the like. My room mate was interested,
but my other friends, even the super nerdy ones, one who even read Forgotten
Realms
novels all thought that D&D was too nerdy.
But Dungeon Mastering was a major creative outlet for me for
years, and I still had the urge to play, but I couldn’t fill that. Until I found Fear the Boot a podcast about
Table Top RPGs. It was the first Podcast
I listened to, and easily the biggest, though not only influence on Last Time
on Videogames. If you’ve any interest in
Table Top RPGs go listen to it. On second
thought don’t, it’s a way better Podcast than ours with a huge back log and you
might not come back.
So in honor of one of my favorite hobbies, the third Friday
of every month, I’m going to write a column on Table Top RPGs and how they’ve
influenced videogames. What Videogames
can learn from them, and conversely, what Table Top games should take from
them. Also, lately I’ve been tooling
around with porting a very popular videogame series, one mentioned in the
article, to the Table Top. No promises,
but if I decide to continue with the project, this may become a design diary of
sorts for the project. Stay tuned.
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