Online World of Games

Having started a new RPG session, I found my way back into the online world of discussions about roleplaying. RPGs and CCGs are mainstream at this point. If you want to know what the board game world is going to look like when it becomes mainstream, take a look at what the RPG and CCG worlds are like right now.

The incredible amount of information and sites, as well as the massively low signal to noise ratio, doesn't bother me, but that is because I am an expert information searcher - I consider it one of my professional skills, after all. But I can see how it would bother other people.

On the topic of low SNR, after putting a link on the Monopoly post telling people to go to BGG to learn about other games, I decided to take a look at the new home page of BGG as if I was a new user. Not logged in, of course. I leave it to my esteemed readers to tell me whether they think the new home page to the site is of any value to potential new players.

Anyhoo.

I know that a lot of board gamers have difficulty separating the "environment" of RPGs from the games themselves, the same way that they can't separate the environment of CCGs from the CCG itself. Still, I can't help but feel that my esteemed readers are better than that, and won't mind if I occasionally link to some RPG or CCG material without thinking that I am "luring them into the dark side".

There was a great amount of wonderful stuff that I used to look at back in the nineties. For CCG's, who can forget the information from thedojo.com, mtgnews, the deck vortex, the card lists at Wizards of the Coast, and so on? For RPGs, there was the entire d20 system online (I was excited about that until I actually played it), ENWorld.org, and all those great Netbooks. And the RPG equivalent to the Misadventures in Gaming series: the woeful tales of a sick game group by Ab3 on the RPG.net forums (try "Rants and Reviews" on this site).

Today I found this funny post about violent girl gamers. Very amusing.

It reminds me of the night before my high school graduation. I still have no idea how I managed to accomplish this, but I rounded up four cute girls from my high school, as well as my two older brothers, and we all went for an all-night game of D&D out in SUNY Stony Brook.

I still don't know how I convinced them to come. They were friends, but they had never played D&D and we had graduation the next day. But they had a great time. They also gravitated towards playing the heavily weaponed fighting PCs. As the night became later and later, towards 2 or 3 am, they began to get sillier and sillier, acting drunk, hanging upside down off the couches, laughing at everything, and generally going wild. I wish I remembered more about exactly what happened, but I do remember that it was a great night, and very funny.

There is a wealth of great reading in the world of online games outside of the board game world. In fact, and this is a secret, there's a wealth of great reading material outside the game world altogether. And not just fantasy, sci-fi, and military!

Yehuda