I have been playing a large variety of role-playing games for the last 30+ years. I’ll admit that most of my experience with the variety of games come mostly from more than 20 years ago, and much less so now. I had never been too wedded to any single system, but always came back to D&D in some form or another. I just really enjoyed playing RPG’s, especially in person.
With a lot of time between gaming because of the pandemic, I had a lot more time to look into what I might play next. I knew there were certain aspects of gaming that I would not go back to. I truly enjoyed the electronic version of character sheets. Yes, paper is still fun, but if you are the DM, it is nice to have access to electronic character sheets to confirm contents, help shepherd players, and just to make sure that the millions of rules that are in place can actually be followed. It was an interesting learning experience the first time I used electronic sheets. It turned out that some rules I thought I knew were not quite correct, and when digging in a fury, because I knew I must be right, it turns out that I was also right zero times.
Secondarily was to use the gaming table that had so painstakingly been constructed and updated. This means looking at electronic maps and VTT’s. Delving into that topic is still something that is more rabbit hole than as fully functional as I would like. We use the built-in TV and post maps to it, but full use of VTT’s still alludes me to some extent. But being able to quickly change a map to whatever encounter I might have during a session and possibly several times, and being able to do that nearly instantly? Makes everything flow much more easily.
Which leads to the real question, what RPG will we play. I enjoyed Pathfinder v1, but it now had one major problem. The support for the electronic character sheet was being discontinued. Pathfinder v2, besides being a fairly horrible game system, only had a truly horrific web site to manage character sheets. I swear I would stab the person that spec’ed that one out. I have seen better web sites when we were still using NCSA HTTPd to drive “web” sites. Finally, there was the aim of most VTT’s to publish D&D first, and anything else third. With the recent issues with Wizards of the Coast that might change, but not when I was looking.
What does all of this mean? It was time to move to D&D 5e. With some resistance, because did I really want to memorize the eight version of some D&D rules at my age? Hell yes. So, most of the future posts here will be ignoring most other systems and focus on what I am playing, which is D&D 5e.
