Pencil & Paper RPG Experiences?

[Steely Jim]

I was initially attracted to MMORPGs about 7 years ago, although I had some friends playing Ultima years before that. I have played many different turn-based strategy games and RPGs (and a few crossovers between the two).

I started playing MMOGs with the idea that what the computer lacked in flexibility and dynamism would gained back by the “dice rolls” becoming invisible, and getting to always be a player rather than the “Dungeon Master.”

MMOGs turned out to mostly facilitate a lot of between character quantitative comparisons, and occasional qualitative comparisons…still between characters though. Personally, I would still be playing pencil & paper games, but I ran out of fellow players somewhere around 1993. My adult gaming groups were almost always bunch people that worked 2nd shift in different types of jobs; we used to play once or twice a week, in the wee hours of the morning, but we also did a lot of general “shooting the breeze” and after work imbibing and setting up other stuff for times when different groups of us could do daylight stuff over the course of the coming week. I tried joining a couple “hobby shop” games, but all the side chat was always about other fantasy stuff, and their heaviest play session were during times that I would normally have reserved for doing daylight/outdoor stuff.

I was recently thinking about PotCO and POF, as providing a means (and possibly a small audience) for playing some fairly informal role playing. I have always preferred the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (I started with D&D but quickly switched), so I was thinking that the open-license version OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation and Wizard of the Coast’s d20 SRD would provide everyone with enough freely available information to run a minimal game.

For those who may never have gamed but know of “free form” role play, this is different in the sense that successes/failures are mediated by dice rolls (random number generation), and moderated by a Game Master. For those who may have played, I prefer a story-driven game rather that a mechanics driven game; I try to keep the dice rolling to a minimum (mostly at critical story junctures, combat, and player initiated actions where they’re expecting it).

So, the extra bonus question is, would you want to play a PotCO themed P&P RPG by taking care of between “quest” activities casually through these forums (Activities), and then maybe having a quest per week (possibly split between 2 sessions)? How to best contend with “quest” sessions can be decided later. “Quest,” here, meaning a series of adventures (like chapters in a book) constructed by a group of people and with some sense of the unknown retained by randomizing outcomes (essentially, what we do in game but when run by a real person quests can be more than “laundry lists”).