Dave's D&D Musings

For my next review I'll be looking at Pathfinder: Beastiary 2, however before that I thought I'd muse on Dungeons and Dragons, and my angle on it.

Unusually, I didn't start role playing with D&D. My first game was Shadowrun, and perhaps that's why my perceptions are rather different to others. In fact, to date, I don't own a core D&D book.

I knew of D&D, and even played 1 session, but my initial perceptions were not overly favourable. The class system felt way too controlling after coming from an open game like Shadowrun, and the fact that my rogue couldn't seem to hit anything, and when he did never managed to do more than 2 points of damage, kinda put me off! So, I was playing Shadowrun and Legend of the Five Rings, with a bit of old World of Darkness.

I got a better look at D&D when 3rd Edition was released, but I never really had an opportunity to play in a decent game, so my perceptions were coloured by what I could read about it. It bemused me that Spot, Listen and Search were different skills. Surely just because I'm a rogue does not mean my eyesight is amazing, but I have poor hearing. Why do I have to kill things to get XP? I have these social skills, why can't I just ask them to give me the gold rather than killing them.

It was oddities like that, that stopped me persuing D&D any further. I was quite happy with the other games I was playing, and branching out into more oWoD and looking forward to Exalted. D&D just wasn't a game that inspired me.

It wasn't until my 3rd year at Uni did I take an opportunity to play in a D&D campaign. Starting off during a pause in my Exalted campaign this was my first good look at D&D 3.5 from a player's point of view.

If this was a fictional story, this would be the point where I changed my mind and became the world's biggest D&D fan. I'm sorry to say that didn't happen. But, I got a much better appreciation for it than before. Sure, most of my issues with the system still existed, and given the stupid number of books that were around I wasn't about to go and buy into it, but I was willing to give associated systems ago.

So, when it was released I got Arcana Evolved, and I was ok with the Iron Kingdoms RPG being D20 based.

When 4th Edition was announced, I wasn't taken with what I saw, but Pathfinder, for some reason, I didn't mind. It has fixed some of the odd things (finally a Perception skill) and with so many less books to worry about, I was willing to buy into it. All in all, I've been very happy with the books so far, and am even trying to convert Iron Kingdoms to Pathfinder.

Perhaps I have a problem when the setting doesn't grab me. None of the existing settings for D&D have really held my interest. However Arcana Evolved and Iron Kingdoms both have interesting settings behind them. Hell, I've got RPGs that I might never run, simply because I love the setting.

So, that's my little bit of musing.