gamergirl

I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons for several years now, and it’s a genre of gaming I particularly enjoy. I used to play fairly regularly (perhaps once a week) with a group of friends, but several of the people I ran campaigns with have moved out of town and it’s been hard to get a new one going. So, when my husband and I were invited to play at a RPGA Event at a local game store, we decided to give it a try.

RPGA events have apparently been around for a while, nearly as long as DnD itself, but I’d never played in one before and I can’t say I’m likely to again. At its heart, Dungeons and Dragons is a roleplaying game, but the format of the RPGA events seem to severely cut out or limit both the quantity and the impact of roleplay. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t remove something central to a game and still expect it to retain the same level of enjoyability.

Wizards of the Coast certainly tries to leave the players choices and the ability to impact the game, but because they intend the sessions to be

• Self-contained
• Easy to Dungeon Master
• Over within a set time period

…they’re really hampered in this and the player ends up faced with an extremely limited palette of choices that will all ultimately lead the players to a very similar place in the story. There’s strong pressure to avoid extreme creativity, as any non-obvious solution probably isn’t going to be permitted. For example, if you’re faced with a choice between guarding Gate A or Gate B, you can choose to guard either or split the party up. What you can’t choose to do is have the mayor post guards at both locations with instructions to run and let you know the moment they spot any trouble. This isn’t because the mayor is unwilling or there aren’t guards available. It’s because the script of the game doesn’t consider that option and hasn’t told the DM how to proceed in such circumstances. That takes a lot of the fun and “creative” aspect out of the game.

Another place where the limitations of the format arise is in talking to the various NPCs (non-player-characters). The NPCs have pre-scripted responses that they will say to you when you ask questions of a certain genre. This is fine when you’re dealing with specific information. But if they don’t have a response pre-written for even the general-knowledge questions you ask them, you won’t get a response. This makes the “roleplay” portion of the event extremely tedious as you must talk to more or less every NPC to get the one piece of information he or she is allowed to tell you. You can’t get any more, and there’s little reason to stop talking to them before you get the piece you need. There are a few “optional” events you can do or not do, but the ones we did had very little noticeable impact on the progression of the campaign. Apparently they gave us bonuses to an important diplomacy check we made at the end, but we would have succeeded on that without any bonuses other than those our characters inherently had.

All that being said, I am glad I went once, to see what it was like, even if I would definitely recommend against the format. I’d never played in a pre-constructed setting before, and while I hated the pre-constructed campaign, it was great having maps of a a city that felt logical and real, and didn’t require the DM to scrabble at the last minute when you wanted to go somewhere he hadn’t planned. I think the next time we get people together to play, we’ll definitely consider going with a pre-built world, even if we’ll come up with our own storylines.