Thursday, August 7, 2014

I Blame Dragonlance...Okay I Contradicted Myself

Day #7 asks what is the most 'intellectual' RPG owned...not sure what that means.  So I guess I lose.

I'm guess it is either an intellectual property thing, like Babylon 5 or Star Wars.  OR it means it takes a lot of brain cells to understand it. Not sure if I have very much of either.

I'm going to go with the intellectual property side because I think all RPGs require a lot of brain cells depending on your group and the amount of drinks consumed during the game.

I don't think I have any intellectual property games.  No Star Trek.  No Star Wars.  No Babylon 5.  No Dresden Files.  I've never been a fan of it I guess.  And I blame Dragonlance.

Please give me a moment to warm up the way back machine to explain.

A billion years ago when the sun was still forming and there were only three and a half planets in the solar system there was Dragonlance the trilogy.  I ate those books up.  Nom nom nom.  Then TSR released a series of Dragonlance adventure modules.....this was bad.  Nay.  It sucked.

Here's why.  The adventures had you follow the story of the book.  The pre gens were all characters from the book.  If you hadn't read the books and others had then the conversation went something like this.

"Tasslehoff wouldn't do that."

"I don't care, he's a thief.  I steal Tanis's sword."

"We wouldn't do that."

"I fireball Riverwind.  I want a shot at Goldmoon."

"What the hell?  Rastlin wouldn't...okay, he might do that, but not until years later."

It's didn't work.  The adventures are the worst TSR put out as far as I'm concerned.  Especially since there was so much hype surrounding it at the time. 

I know this is an extreme case, but it was enough to cause gamer trauma.  I also know that all the other games are well received, but I guess the other main reason why is I'm not all that interested.  If someone wants to run a Star Wars game I'm there, but I won't run one.  Conan, sure, but again, not too interested in buying a bunch of gaming supplements that mirrors this. 

BUT!  I will contradict myself and nearly nullify I said above this so if you want to skip to this part and start reading that's okay to.  I do have Dragon Age and Thieves World books.  Actually Dragon Age should have been on my post of games I never got to play.  I would defiantly love to run a game in either of those.  I would even be tempted to do a Black Company campaign.

But I think I've screwed this post around enough.  So...there it is.

4 comments:

  1. The first trilogy was pretty weak, there were action points and other situations only actually explored in the modules...urk. I actually liked the second dragonlance trilogy because it didn't do this.
    As for the modules I think I played in one or two and it wasn't a big deal because the DM was flexible.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So...what's the most _anti-intellectual_ game you have?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I had somewhat the same experience. Only the DM had read the books and hadn't played a previous Gamma World campaign of mine (one which dealt with a metal poor world), so he grew angry at us when we happily ignored the scenario and just started killing random encounters to steal and sell their iron weapons. We had an evening of chaos and we moved onto to something else.

    ReplyDelete