Top 6 Reasons Why Tabletop Games Are Better Than Video Games

I’ll be doing a companion piece flipping things around in the next couple of days.

1.  You will never need to upgrade that Monopoly board you bought back in 1985. Oh sure, manufacturers release new editions of board games all the time.  They may even go to the trouble of revising the rules or adding new mechanics to keep the game fresh and exciting.  But if you really, really like the Stratego set or the old-school Clue you have–and you’ve kept it free from water, fire, mold, and the grubby hands of a toddler–then guess what: you can still pull that bad boy out today and play it.  You don’t need to worry about having the right console or OS, you don’t need to worry that the disc has been scratched up, you don’t have to worry about it simply not working because the internal parts are oh so delicate.  And you what’s really cool?  No matter how complex or expensive board games get, you will never have to upgrade your graphics card to play them.

2.  Your D&D Core Rulebook won’t get fried in a power surge.  Your mobo will.  Your dungeon tiles won’t mysteriously vanish into thin air.  Your OS will crash. It’s a known fact: computers hate their users.  They lure you in with a false sense of security, and them BAM! they die.  The OS won’t boot, you get the Blue Screen, or a game locks up on you every time you try to run.  You try every fix, and you eventually end up making things worse.  Time for a trip to Reformat Row.  Or even better: you open up the case to figure out if it’s a hardware problem, and you see a broken fan.  This of course explains the video card spot-welded to its port, the RAM that’s shaped like the letter U, and the black spots on the motherboard.  Game consoles aren’t much better.  In fact, they’re worse.  You can repair a computer without fixing EVERYTHING (most of the time), but the only way to fix a console is to buy a new one.  In D&D–or any other tabletop game–the only thing that hates you is the dice, and they don’t hate you so much as have a cold sense of randomness.  You don’t have to worry about stuff shorting out or burning up, and it’s cool that electrical surges, dust, heat, and general shenanigans won’t make your tabletop gear stop working.

3.  Absolutely no limit on narrative elements, ever. In tabletop games, your head is the canvas, your imagination the brush strokes.  Who doesn’t play a game of Monopoly and imagine city streets, bustling with tourists and workers, beneath glistening towers of steel and glass, those towers housing the corporate pit fighters that the players are meant to represent?  In Warhammer 40K or Magic: the Gathering, I can fight with honor and dignity, using no more force than is necessary to vanquish my foes, or I can grind my enemies into dust–and develop a real personality for myself and my army around my approach.  The low-tech presentation of board games and pen/paper RPGs demands that players use their imagination to spice up narrative and appeal to the senses.  Video games?  Not so much.  If I don’t think that post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. looks the way it does in Fallout 3, too bad.  That’s the way it looks.  Questions of morality and ethics are determined by black/white, yes/no decisions with no common ground, and all too often once I choose a path I’m bound to it.  Back story for characters is even more limited, often dictated to you or made out of a glorified mathematical formula.  If you want richness of character or setting in video games, you need to write fan-fic.  If you want richness of character or setting in tabletop games, just play.

4.  “It’s never the same game twice” is more than just a tag line on back of the box. Chance is the defining element of every tabletop game: the roll of dice, the draw of the card, the position of a piece.  Board games test adaptability and careful, strategic thought.  Video games test those things, but primarily they test twitch reflexes and have a heavy emphasis on pattern memorization/recognition.  They are linear and overly structured, and eventually lose their replay value.  That is why tabletop gaming will never get old, while one of the trending topics in video game culture is the lack of variety in the works offered up.

5.  A truly customizable experience, while video games create the illusion of custom personalization. Try to house-rule Fallout 3.  Go ahead.  Try and say “You know, I’m just not good at this game, no matter how much I lower the difficulty.  I’m just no good at it.  But I want to explore the game world and enjoy the story and get some victories under my belt, so that I can eventually get better.  I want to learn the mechanics of the game at my own pace.  So I’m going to give myself unlimited action points until I get a feel for the flow of combat.  Yeah, unlimited action points so that I can fight any enemy at any time using V.A.T.S. and not have to rely on pure skill.”  That is, in no way, ever going to happen.  You can, however, ask your friends if they can alter the rules of the new board game you’re all playing together to give you a bit of a fair shake until you’ve got a grasp on the concept.  Or say you want to mix things up a little, make things a little wild and crazy.  Say you want to play a game of Trouble where you can split up your dice roll amongst all four of your pieces.  Well, go right ahead!  What’s stopping you?  You can tailor even the most strict of board games to your particular game play tastes, so long as your friends are cool with it.  Case in point:  how many of you have played a game of Monopoly where you put all of the money collected from taxes in the middle of the board, and should anybody land on the Free Parking space, they get it?  Yeah, that’s not in the rules.  How many of you have played an online game of Halo 3 wherein the object of the game was to see how long one could go without shooting another player, as opposed to racking up as many kills as possible?  Didn’t think so.

6.  Until they really invent HAL, there is no AI that can compete with human intelligence. Contrary to popular belief (and mountains of evidence), humans really are smarter than computers.  A CPU can make thousands–millions–of calculations in the time it takes for you to blink.  It can read and translate lines upon lines of code.  It can examine concrete parameters and make a judgment as to how to act in a given situation.  But it cannot think on its own.  A computer–be it a desktop PC, an Xbox 360, or the doomsday machine that is attached to the little red button in the President’s office–can only work with the intelligence given to it, and there is no room for expansion.  The human brain is constantly evolving, constantly growing, and constantly processing not just cold, hard numbers but all kinds of things we cannot make tangible or graph on a coordinate plane: things like emotions, outcomes, relationships.  The Covenant is dictated by algorithms; my Dungeon Master is dictated by the actions of every member of my party, the result she wants for the outcome she is running, the result the party wishes for, her mood, our mood, the weather outside–you name it.  It all combines to make a singular game experience that never gets stale and never feels repetitive.  That is why tabletop gaming is exciting and expansive.  That is why tabletop gaming will always leave you on the edge of your seat, while video games will sometimes leave you bored.

Dungeons and Dragons: Where have you been all of my life?

Tonight I had the best D&D session ever.  Yes, I’m new to the game, so that statement has less weight than if I was an old pro.  That doesn’t erase the fact that I wish it could have lasted into the wee hours of the morning.  I assured my DM that I had enough caffeine in the kitchen to kill an elephant, but she shys away from caffeine for a variety of very sensible reasons–probably because enough of it can kill an elephant, which means it could kill her; several times over.

That didn’t stop my party from hitting the Mountain Dew and cookies though.

My usual party of three was joined by two new players, and hence two new characters, giving us a full-fledged party.  We are only missing a cleric to have a perfectly balanced group, but considering that we have a Warlock, a Wizard, and a Ranger–plus a Fighter that chose damage-dealing over defense, and a Warlord that has some pretty cool attack buffs, plus one power that allows an adjacent ally to make an additional attack on the same target the Warlord just hit–we can usually kill enemies before they do any real harm to us.

We proved this in a very exciting, long encounter that had my character, the Ranger, scurrying up on top of a boulder to snipe away at enemies, while the Fighter and Warlord double-teamed another creature with support from the Wizard.  The Warlock sadly maneuvered himself on to a bad part of the board and took some damage, plus had some bad attack rolls, but he laid down a big Eldritch Blast at a key moment in the battle.  Plus, the Wizard rolled a critical on one spell, dealing out 20 damage, and my Ranger finished the battle with a critical hit from his bow.  We killed three creatures and four minions, with only one bloodied character.  A great fight and a satisfying victory.

The role-playing was also quite fun, better than it had ever been.  Our party has an interesting dynamic in that nobody really likes anybody else.  We watch out for each other in fights, but only because there is strength in numbers.  This leads to some interesting banter at inns and on the road, and sometimes some in-game fist-fights.  Some of that could be changing; the Fighter and I actually worked together in a non-combat encounter and talked about in what direction to take our quest.

I can’t wait for our next session.  It might be a table full of newbs, but we’re learning at a decent click.  Our DM is not only infinitely patient with five guys who never grew out of their teens, but she doesn’t try to actively kill the players; a plus in my book.

And I’m not just saying because I want some phat loot.  Remember: I wanted to give back to the villagers.

And So It Begins: My Dungeons and Dragons career is underway.

Today (or rather, I suppose at this hour, yesterday), I had my first Dungeons and Dragons session.  It was only me, my Dungeon Master (DM), a single dungeon tile from the starter game, the dice, and the rulebooks.  It was brief–a single encoutner with only two goblins–but my was it fun.

I’m proud to say that I used a character I made myself, and not a sample character from the starter game.  I spent a good three hours toiling over the Player’s Handbook, making first a rogue and then a ranger.  I chose Human as the class because I found it to be most versatile and have the best starting powers and abilities.  If my video game habits are anything to go by, I’m sure I’ll be making and playing several characters.  I also plan on doing some DM’ing as well, one day.

It felt good to actually use my hands and some real math skills to do things like swing a sword, as opposed to just pressing a button.  It felt more like I was really doing it, like I was actually there.  It also felt good to use the game to tell a story (as opposed to the game having a story through which I just kind of waded).  Just in case you’re curious, my character “Longstrides” Quinn McCree, a human orphan adopted by a kind dwarf, who had grown up amongst the stout and sturdy race (and thus shares their intense love of good food, good ale, and good company–as well as their ferocity in the fight) and was the friend of many elves who lived in a village near to his childhood home (and learned from them the bow and a love of nature), was given a job by his uncle, an innkeeper: go into the basement of the inn and get rid of whatever is scratching about down there.

Well, he did.  We made a few errors, but considering my DM only had three hours to prepare (while at work, no less) and we only had 30 minutes to play I think we did quite well.

Part of the fun (some might say that all of the fun) of D&D comes from the creative aspect: developing a backstory for your character, fleshing out his/her personality, speaking in character while at the table.  I’m inclined to agree.  I plan on writing out Longstrides’ story this weekend, what brought him to that inn where he meets his fellow adventurers.

There is another creative aspect as well, one born of invention.  I’m fine with spending money on rulebooks, power cards, dice, and a sweet DM screen.  However, considering that conceiveably we could be running multiple games at once (this whole thing is part of our Play Me a Story campaign at Wayne County Public Library), I’m not keen on buying dungeon tiles and miniatures for every character and monster.  So it seems that some hands-on projects making our own miniatures and tiles is in order.  Somehow, I think that will make it even more fun and personal (and a better teaching opportunity for our kids).

Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, possibly loses battle with cancer.

Please be aware that, as the linked-to article says, this story has not been confirmed.  It’s entirely possible that Dave Arneson is still with us.  I originally wrote the post as if the terrible news were true, but found it in better taste to edit it so it reflects the current state of the matter: unknown.

It’s a sad day for gamers: Dave Arneson, who along with recently-departed Gary Gygax, created Dungeons and Dragons, has passed on according to an unconfirmed source.

You may have never played Dungeons and Dragons, but if you have played World of Warcraft or any MMORPG–or any other kind of RPG for that matter, electronic or otherwise–you need to be thankful for this man’s contribution.  He helped to lay down the template that has worked so very well for so very long.

Take a moment and remember the Arneson family in your thoughts and prayers.  Death is hard on a family, and if Dave Arneson is still with us then he is still battling cancer; something just as trying.