RPGA: Is it any good?

[Coreyartus]

Thanks for staying on top of things Pielorinho and Piratecat.

Obviously, this topic has brought out the strong feelings about the success/failure of RPGA as a good gaming experience. If it isn't already apparent to the original poster, the potential experience of playing in an RPGA game can run either extremely hot and enjoyable, or insufferably cold and agonizing, depending on your perspective...

So I guess ya gotta figure it out for yourself. Our advice is obviously going to be... "biased", shall we say? Not to put too fine a point on it?

Good question, though! Try some other boards, you might get some different perspectives.

Coreyartus

 

[Erratic K]

Dogbrain is factually correct about the nature of the test:

Mozilla 1.6 on linux: doesn't work, throws weird errors like non-sequitar questions.

IE6 on linux (CX office): works fine

Mozilla 1.7 on windows 2k: doesn't work

IE6 on win2k: works fine

Firefox 8.1 on Mac OSX 10.3.4: doesn't work

IE 5.2 on Mac OSX 10.3.4: works fine

Safari 1.2.2 on Mac OSX 10.3.4: doesn't work

Good luck if you don't have IE,

-E

PS. I mailed custserv@wizards.com about this... if this infuriates you, please mail them or techsupport@wizards.com

 

[Caliban]

Dogbrain is factually correct about the nature of the test:

Mozilla 1.6 on linux: doesn't work, throws weird errors like non-sequitar questions.

IE6 on linux (CX office): works fine

Mozilla 1.7 on windows 2k: doesn't work

IE6 on win2k: works fine

Firefox 8.1 on Mac OSX 10.3.4: doesn't work

IE 5.2 on Mac OSX 10.3.4: works fine

Safari 1.2.2 on Mac OSX 10.3.4: doesn't work

Good luck if you don't have IE,

-E

PS. I mailed custserv@wizards.com about this... if this infuriates you, please mail them or techsupport@wizards.com

I know the GM tests on the WOTC website has problems, even if you are using IE. For many in the RPGA it's a running gag.

I wasn't actually referring to that in my previous post. And that's all that can be safely said on that subject.

 

[Pielorinho]

Caliban, sorry if it seemed we were overreacting. We've been dealing with some unrelated unpleasantness and might be a little sensitive right now; if folks can stop problems before they begin, all the better.

As for my own experiences with RPGA:

DragonCon is practically right next door to me (in Atlanta), and has a huge RPGA gaming section, or at least has in the past. That's why I don't go to it anymore: I've not had very pleasant experiences in their living campaigns as a player.

My primary form of gaming is with friends, with homebrew (or highly modified published) adventures and lots of houserules to accommodate our peculiar desires. As such, I'm not going to devote much time to a living campaign outside of cons. At a con, I'm just looking for a quick bit of fun, an adventure with a distinctive and fun setup, playable with other folks looking for the same thing.

Unfortunately, my experiences with living campaign folks is that they're very interested in advancing their characters. That's fine, but it's not really what I'm looking for.

At GenCon last year, I ran a few sessions of a living campaign module. One session was great: everyone there was new to living campaigns, and they all brought their characters, and we got started and had a blast.

The second session had four great players and two players who were just awful. How were they awful? Well, they brought notebooks of certs they'd gotten as rewards for decades of RPGA membership, and one of them had gone through the new living campaign rules (I forget the campaign's name--emerald something or other, maybe) and discovered a loophole in the rules that made their character far more powerful than any other character in the group (he had a wand of color spray, purchased at first level, with ten charges that regenerated each session). This was technically within the rules, but violated the spirit of the rules; clearly by the spirit of the rules, that wand should've had 2 charges and not ten.

I pointed this out to him and compromised by giving him 4 charges. Both of those players sulked through the rest of the session: men in their late forties, sulking at a gaming table because a judge made a decision that prevented one character from overpowering the group. It was extremely uncomfortable, and left me with a bad taste for living campaigns.

Are they all like that? Of course not. I know for certain that there are very cool people who participate in them, both as judges and as players. But I've had enough experiences with people who play in a fashion I don't enjoy, experiences disproportional to the negative experiences I've had with gamers in general, that I'm reluctant to play in living campaigns now.

I'm very happy for the folks that have found ways to enjoy them, and I can definitely see how playing them at game days or home games would avoid the problems I experienced.

Daniel

 

[Feanor Starym]

My opinion is that, as an 'open' campaign, the RPGA has the unfortunate tendency to attract the kind of players that typically get shunned from home games. Whereas in a homegame, an anti-social player can get removed, and the game will benefit, it's a lot harder to turn away such players from a Living game. You generally see the same thing happen in other con-games, where there isn't much choice in who you have playing your game.

It's a people problem, which unfortunately, i can't see any permanent solution to. All that members of the RPGA can do, is to attempt to encourage the anti-social element to change, and encourage the roleplaying aspects of the hobby.