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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 9797795" data-attributes="member: 710">My first RPG experience I made when I was around 18 or 19, and my first game was Shadowrun 3E. Shadowrun is as setting mixing cyberpunk and fantasy. It has no classes or levels, you just equipped gear - perhaps cyberware and learned different skills. In that edition, every character had 10 "boxes" of wounds and stun, damage was split into basically the difficulty to resist the damage and its lethality. Attacks dealt damage ranging from light to deadly, and good attack rolls could increase that damage, while thetarget would attempt to resist the damage and reduce the lethality again, armor reducing the difficulty to resist while constitution helped you lower it. It all made a lot of sense and lead to immersive results, I thought, you knew exactly what 3 or 6 boxes of damage meant on each character, you even had injury penalities because obviously getting shot several times is going to hurt and hamper your fighting ability! To cast spells (if your character had magical abilities at all), you needed to make skill checks, and you needed to resist drain. Same thing to summon spirits.Then, a friend of mine found a new gaming group for us to play with. They played many games including Shadowrun, but around the time, a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out, it was the 3rd. They wanted to try it out, and so we did. I had never played D&D, obviously, and never seen it before, and I was a bit ... shocked. It was blatantly videogamey, it had classes, levels, and hit points that increased with level. Someone could take 6 damage and it could mean a mere scratch or fall over dying, but even if you just had 1 hit points, you were fighting with no penalties. Totally unimmersive and implausible.The magic system was also entirely prospesterous, spellcasters didn't need to make skill checks to see if they could cast a spell, it was as easy as pressing a button on a keyboard or gamepad! They also didn't cause any drain, instead, spellcasters would "forget" the spell and couldn't cast them again until they rested for the next morning and memorized it again. Entirely ridicilous that this would be a new game released in the year 2000, when Shadowrun was clearly so far more advanced and immersive and actually attempted to simulate a believable world!Obviously, I went a long way from there, and grew to like (and then hate again) D&D 3E and D&D, and my thoughts on this have become more... complex, so to speak. But it is fun, and I think it's not an accident that people not immediately in love with any edition of D&D make video game comparisions - even though we also know the truth is probably that those video games simarilities exist because those video games were inspired by D&D originally...</blockquote>

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