#RPGaDay2023 – Day 3: First RPG BOUGHT this year

Luckily for us there’s a paper trail on this one.  Almost every day I check out Drivethrurpg and see what’s going on in the rpg world.  Occasionally I buy things.  Once in a blue moon I’ll buy a real physical analog RPG book but not often.  I much prefer actual real physical analog RPG books but when you’re just buying them to check it out and don’t even really intend to ever play it there’s no reason not to get the pdf version.  Especially since I just recently did a big purge/declutter of old gaming stuff. 

Checking the records the first RPG I bought this year was Demon The Descent, which is mildly embarrassing for reasons I can’t fully explain.  I believe it was on sale for $3 and I thought, hey that’s only one of the “original” world of darkness books I never checked out.  Which isn’t even correct because Demon the FALLEN was OGWOD and Demon the Descent is new WOD.  How humiliating.

I’d give it a rating of three mehs out of five. 

The world of darkness occupies an uninteresting place in the gaming lore of my friend group.  We started out playing D&D and TMNT all the time as is tradition.  Then someone would save up their allowance to buy a new different game and we’d get really into that for a few months.  Then we’d get bored with it and go back to dark lord D&D.  Cycle repeat.

Vampire/WOD was one of the first interlopers that broke the pattern and stuck around.  It was definitely a game we liked in theory more than in practice but we still played it a lot.  One gaming memory that will stick with me a long time if not forever is a new guy was making a character and I asked him what clan he was going to be and he said “Wu-Tang”.  This was very serious stuff. 

Here on WordPress I’ve found a decent amount of navel gazing about the old world of darkness games.  For whatever reason people of my ilk like to talk about it.  I don’t remember the exact phrasing but one blogger nailed the WOD – it was intended to be a high-falutin’ storytelling game about the nature of humanity and compassion and forgiveness in a world filled with evil but we all played it as a vampire-themed supers game. 

Accurate. 

By the rules you were supposed to track conscious and self-control a bunch of other virtues and worry becoming a monster but instead our games were running gun battles leaping across rooftops with vampire super jumps and using crazy vampire powers to wail on people and hurl cars at each other.

The funny thing about that is that I feel like there has never been a supers game that really caught on.  I think the fact that a lot, if not most, people were playing Vampire the same way we were means that people want superpowered games but as far as I can tell there’s never been a popular one.

White Wolf (or whoever, I’ve lost track of the publication history of this property) even came out with a supers game later on but no one really cared about it.  Somehow that game that made for super stuff wasn’t as good at being a supers game as the other game which wasn’t supposed to be that.

That’s the first game I bought this year.  The first game I got this year was a PWYW called Bootleggers.  I wanted to pay 0 dollars.  It was okay. 

I pick up a decent number of PWYW titles off drivethrurpg.  I very rarely go back and give the people any money.  If it’s something I really enjoyed I will go buy one of their other things.  A lot of the time the product is not something I want to support anyway so that doesn’t bother me.  But, there’s a middle group of things where I think “that wasn’t great but it’s better than the zero dollars I paid for it” and I feel guilty for not going back and giving them a couple bucks.  But I still don’t do it. 

I wonder which makes me more of a monster destroying the creative community and therefore the world, that or using pictures in my blog sometimes. 

Oh, right, the positivity.  I like getting and reading RPGs, either paying for them or being given them for free.  I do not steal them.

HERO!!!