What Board Game Are You Currently Playing?

[IAmBatman]

Gloomhaven isn’t a role playing game. It’s a fully coop, legacy campaign-style dungeon puzzle crawl.

[caps]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

Gloomhaven isn’t a role playing game. It’s a fully coop, legacy campaign-style dungeon puzzle crawl.

Right, and if I wanted to play a fully coop, legacy campaign-style dungeon puzzle crawl I would play an RPG

[chas]

Just had three more great games of Seasons of Inis, bringing the total played core and new expansion to 24. If you're in the NYC area, I'm offering it again next Saturday Aug. 3.

Finishing up the new scenarios of C&C Medieval. Adding those to all of the new ones for Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare and Memoir 44; New Flight Plan recently finished. That's a lot of new Commands & Colors played over the last two months--almost 100 scenarios! And I'm planning to play the non C&C game Battle of Britain, also by Richard Borg, soon for the first time too. Its a revamp of his older original version.

Just got a copy of The Resistance: Avalon as a prize in the recent Islandscape tournament, along with a yet another "Worst Luck" trophy this year. Should be trying TRA out for the first time soon.

[IAmBatman]

Originally Posted by capsocrates

Right, and if I wanted to play a fully coop, legacy campaign-style dungeon puzzle crawl I would play an RPG

Which RPG would you play? Most of them I know of require a dungeon master and many of them are more about roleplaying a part rather than solving a puzzle.

[caps]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

Which RPG would you play? Most of them I know of require a dungeon master and many of them are more about roleplaying a part rather than solving a puzzle.

I would play one that requires a Dungeon Master. I prefer RPGs over other games so much that I frequently take the role of Dungeon Master to make the game happen.


As for puzzles vs. role playing, sure, RPGs *add* a role play element to the mix, but there is variation from table to table (and player to player) how much emphasis is placed on that. My groups tend to be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Regardless, I think a good RPG session will usually have at least one of a good puzzle, a good combat, or a good mystery.


Also, to be clear, the fundamental element of role playing is the players being given a situation and the players deciding how their *characters* will react to that situation; what decisions will they make? Everything else (voice acting, dialogue, etc. etc.) is just fluff. There's nothing wrong with making characters that closely mirror yourself and the way that you think when you are playing a game in order to remove the distance between yourself and your character (although most people start branching out once they've been playing for a while).

[IAmBatman]

What you are describing is very different than Gloomhaven.

[quozl]

So Gloom haven has puzzles? I didn't know that. What are they like?

[caps]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

What you are describing is very different than Gloomhaven.

Right, because Gloomhaven strips the whole thing down to a) be playable without a GM and b) emphasize the game element of it. But Gloomhaven is still an RPG. It has the other core element of an RPG, which is a character (or characters) that change by gaining new skills, mastering their existing skills, and/or gaining new equipment. Good RPGs bring the two definitions together by making it so that a player that utilizes the strength of their character mechanically will also tend to do things that fit the character as a person.

When the creator of the game describes the game this way

Players will take on the role of a wandering mercenary with their own special set of skills and their own reasons for traveling to this remote corner of the world. Players must work together out of necessity to clear out menacing dungeons and forgotten ruins. In the process they will enhance their abilities with experience and loot, discover new locations to explore and plunder, and expand an ever-branching story fueled by the decisions they make. This is a persistent game that is intended to be played over many game sessions. After a scenario, players will make decisions on what to do, which will determine how the story continues...

He is describing a role playing game.

Anyway, I get that some people prefer games that don't require a GM, and I'm not arguing about that. I'm just stating that the core experiences of Gloomhaven all exist in a typical tabletop RPG, and my own preference would be to spend 4 hours a session playing an RPG that lets me create my own character, allows me to customize it more deeply, and allows that character to have a bigger (and less predictable) impact on the game world.

With that said, in a hypothetical world where I had multiple nights a week to dedicate to various lengthy games, Gloomhaven does seem pretty cool and would probably make the rotation.

[IAmBatman]

Originally Posted by quozl

So Gloom haven has puzzles? I didn't know that. What are they like?

A lot like the ones in Pandemic Legacy, but more intricate.

I find the fully coop aspect of Gloomhaven deeply appealing and find that the stripped down aspect also gives it more consistency in quality than full on roleplaying games, which vary a lot more based on personality intangibles from the DM and various players. I think the structure and removal of a DM (the gamification) highlights the aspects of an RPG that I most like. Much like Pandemic Legacy does.

[quozl]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

A lot like the ones in Pandemic Legacy, but more intricate.

I don't know Pandemic Legacy either.

[IAmBatman]

Originally Posted by quozl

I don't know Pandemic Legacy either.

Less a visual puzzle and more of an action/resource optimization puzzle.

[quozl]

Oh. Not the kind of puzzle I like to play.