As the About page suggests, this blog is about my journey back into the world of table-top role-playing games, and this is its inaugural post.
For an assortment of reasons I’ve decided to revisit RPGs after decades away and to write about it here, so it seems like a good place to start is to talk about finding… er… a good place to start.
When I took a look around at the RPG marketplace it seems to have grown larger (in terms of the range of available products – I have no idea of the relative number of participants) and more varied than it ever was in the old days. There are more entries in every genre, and more genres to choose from. There are more “generic” options designed with genre flexibility in mind. There are basic and advanced versions, proprietary and open-source versions, and many of those versions have versions of their own. Even the once-monolithic giant that was Dungeons and Dragons is now divided between the Nth edition players, the old-schoolers who swear by the earlier rule sets, the Pathfinder splinter faction, and others I’ve probably missed.
With so many options, finding a starting point seemed daunting. A few facts came together to make the choice a simple one, however:
- While I spent a fair amount of time playing the online game “City of Heroes”, my wife was an absolute devotee who stuck around until the day they flipped the off switch in the server room. So a comic-book based game seemed like a reasonable place to start.
- I while back on Facebook I followed & eventually FB-friended Jeff Dee based on some (non-gaming-related) podcast work he’s done over the years. I discovered that not only was he an illustrator on a number of those D&D books I spent so much time poring over all those years ago, but also was a co-creator of a superhero game I’d heard of but never played called Villains and Vigilantes. Jeff’s company, Monkey House Games, last year released (after a protracted legal battle over naming rights, apparently) V&V 3.0: Mighty Protectors.
I watched through a number of videos on the Monkey House YouTube channel and the gameplay seemed straightforward and not overburdened with too much complexity or slowed by too many dice rolls being required to get anything done.
So, Mighty Protectors it is! We’ve played a few rounds of it already and are all still adjusting to the nuances of the rules, trying to find that challenging-but-not-too-challenging balance, and figuring out ways the characters can work together based on their strengths and weaknesses. Overall we’ve all enjoyed it so far.
Initially most of the entries in this blog will revolve around the characters & scenarios created for my family’s MP campaign with myself as GM and my wife and one or both of my kids as the players, along with some of the do-it-yourself work we’ve put in to keep this effort from being a financial investment.
Experienced GMs and players – I’ve been away from this long enough that I’m all but a newbie at it, so please chime in if you have suggestions or constructive criticism!