Tangible gaming

Over the course of this week I’ve done almost no MMORPG gaming, but I’ve been lucky enough to do a good amount of other gaming. We’ve played two different rpg sessions in the room with friends or family (Starfinder & 5E D&D). Although we played Starfinder using Fantasy Grounds with everything ‘virtual’, including the dice rolls; for D&D we opted to go a hybrid route and used FG for the character sheets and the battle maps, but with all dice rolls done using my nephew’s very extensive polyhedral dice collection.

The second game really brought home the tangible aspect of this type of ‘in the room’ gaming that is, unfortunately, missing from virtual tabletop equivalent. To be clear without Fantasy Grounds we’d have done a lot less rpg sessions over the years, it’s a great asset to my hobby. There is a certain frisson from getting to physically roll real dice though – I forget how enjoyable it can be.

To add to the rpg sessions we also received a D&D Adventure System boxed set for Christmas. This fits very much into the same idea – it’s a simplified 4E D&D board game using dungeon tiles and miniatures. The rules are streamlined, but recognisably D&D. You get that visceral pleasure of moving your character around on a board and rolling a die. It works very well actually. We had a lot of fun with this – the difficulty level is actually set quite high and we failed the first attempt pretty quickly, but with some tactical thinking we made a successful second go.

So it’s nice at this time of year, when we normally spend a good chunk of time with friends and family to put the online gaming on pause and get those dice out!