Gamescience

This is a bit of a strange post, but I picked up Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games by Matt Barton at the GDC the other week.  Starting reading it, got me thinking about the years when my babysitter’s best option to get me to go to bed on time was to threaten my character sheet.  Yes, a miss-spent youth of 1st ed. AD&D, partly enabled by my Dad who not only hired babysitters who then spent the evening DMing for my brother and I (something that I am sure some folks would see as abuse) and then buying me my first set of dice (and painting in the numbers) for me for Christmas when I was still in elementary school.

So after going back and looking through the original D&D materials, I am impressed, it is a more complicated game than I realized, in a big way I think the only reason latter editions seem to offer very much, like 2nd edition is because we never really utilized all that was in the first edition to begin with.  AD&D now is more like a strange hybrid of miniature game and card game and feels a bit like WOW even as you chain abilities together, and deal with cool downs.  It isn’t much of a role playing game, or fantasy world.  It isn’t a very good example of any of the game types it combines.

So I am going back to 1st Edition, to re-explore it and when equipping myself for that I realized I needed my original dice, that the polished rounded edge dice one finds so easily now didn’t seem authentic.  I was missing a few of my dice from almost 30 years ago, but after some web searching found this:

http://www.gamescience.com/gemrole-playingsets

http://www.chessex.com/Dice/Raw/raw_dice_home.htm

I am not sure how having precision-edge dice will actually improve the play experience, its not like I plan to bust out a pair of green corduroy pants and a shirt with race cars on it, but going back to read through the 1st edition books and considering the look and feel of those precision dice is almost entertaining in itself.

Granted how I will find time to do this with Dragon Age II out I am not sure, but then, sadly for a guy who studies video games, I think I might rather give Dragon Age II a miss and try to recreate an experience more like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz24ByUiXWA&NR=1

Jer