The Roll Of The Die | My Experience With Tabletop Role Playing Games

Unlike many gamers I do not have that much experience with role playing games of any kind let alone table top games. I played a session of Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in high school a decade ago and I do not remember much other than there was something to do with a magic chicken. Other than that, nothing about the experience really enticed me or made me want to play it again. And I never did after that.

Until recently in Digital Literacies class aka. Video Game Class after a recent play through of Call Of Cthullu, I never understood the appeal of table top role playing games. I thought they were too dull, nowhere near immersive enough, and they relied too much on the dungeon master's imagination and game plan and sometimes they turn the whole affair into a farce or make it too difficult and overall not that entertaining or fun. Call Of Cthullu though shattered those conceptions and showed me that table top role playing games can be every bit as immersive and fun as a console or computer game, if not even more so.

Its amazing how the role of the dice and its spontaneous and unpredictable nature leads to such a engrossing game even minus state of the art graphics and all of the facets that come with a console or a computer game. Unlike D&D Cthullu has more options for the player to physically and mentally interact with the game space in the form of various different physical and tangible clues that the player can gain access to. It also through a strong framework allows the keeper to be creative with how the game is played but not so much to the point where the focus of the game becomes lost. Something that tends to happen with some games of D&D or other role playing table top adventures.

I think my enjoyment and immersion into Call Of Cthullu is also greatly enhanced by my overactive imagination. I have always been in tune with my imagination ever since I was a kid and this game just leads me back to that particular time frame and mindset. I can picture the abandoned burnt down church in my mind as my character and the rest of the group explore its hidden crevices and depths. I can see the eerie reptillian eye scrawled on the walls and feel the chills go down my spine. And due to the games reliance upon imagination, my mind can conjure up horrors that can be more terrifying than what a game developer for a console or a computer might come up with. Horrors that connect right into my soul.

Comments

Halo Memories

Halo was a watershed game for me when I was a teenager. It was the first time that I was playing a game that was actually a legitimate part of cultural lexicon. Before I had only been playing games that were no longer popular or not as popular as they once were. But when my step dad bought an x-box and introduced me to Halo, that finally changed. I played it religiously with my step dad after school on the Campaign mode and sometimes by myself and I was blown away by the game. I had never seen anything like it before. The graphics were stunning, the controls were varied but not too complicated, and the story was just as well written as the best sci-fi films. Halo was also a landmark for me in the sense that it was the first video game I remembered beating and finishing to completion. So many hours of my teenage years were spent playing Halo and it will always have a special place in my heart and it is one of the few games that made me feel a sense of euphoria and elation up...

What I Am Playing(Day 2) | NES

Now, I am playing with power. I actually grew up with an NES in the 90's. The SNES was all the rage and so was the Genesis but my parents didn't have the money to get me one of those consoles or if they did, I never really asked for one. I wasn't what you would call a hardcore gamer. I was casual to the core. But when my Aunt got me an original NES, I really became infatuated with the console. I didn't have that many games. I only had a small bag full, but I played the heck out of all of them. I would have gotten more games and played those too if it wasn't for my cousin not following my directions and taking the game out of the slot while the system was on. He broke the system, my spirit and my will to buy another console let alone more games. In honor of my late NES, I decided to head over to a friend's house who had a Retron-5 and play the games of my youth. I started out with a true classic. Super Mario Bros. This was the game I played the most. I...

Machine Acts

There are two types of Machine Acts in video games. The diagetic and the non-diagetic. Here are a couple examples of the two. The loading screen for any level on Halo: Combat Evolved is an example of a non-diagetic machine act because you cannot skip the loading screen, nor can you interact with it in anyway and it does not change the form of gameplay or the way you play the game. As for a non-diagetic machine act, a prime example of this is the kill animation. There are kill animations in multiple video games. But the one that comes to mind most of the time is the Fatality animation from the Mortal Kombat series. The kill animation forces the player to just sit there and watch the animation as the machine plays the code and the animation to the player.

Brown's Bit By Bit

Search This Blog