Editorial: Where Do We Go, From Here?
I've been playing a lot of City of Heroes lately. A lot. I'd say it's safe to classify it as my primary hobby at the moment, to, yes, the exclusion of Fudge and tabletop gaming in general. It's well-timed, at least, in that the games I'm in or running are gone on hiatus due to the descent of Wedding Season upon my peers, but looking to the future, it's a bit troubling all the same.
It's troubling, because it's been so easy to just walk away from the tabletop, and not think so much about the games played there. I have never played a massively multiplayer online RPG before -- heck, for City, I bought a Windows machine, something I haven't owned myself... well, ever -- and as such I hadn't been confronted before with the genre's startling powers of entertainment.
As such, I'd never really had a chance to contemplate the threat these games represent, as it were, to our hobby at large. Sure, it's difficult (though possible) to do some "real" role-playing here, but it certainly seems like such things are well within reach. Further, the mechanics of the world can be as complex as they need to be -- the computer's handling all of the workings, after all, so no dice to futz with, no paper notes to flip through, and no preparation necessary to get in and get going.
So where do we go, from here, as a hobby? I've brought this question up with some of my gaming friends, ones who are well-exposed to the City and have gone on various adventures with my characters, who also play or run the tabletop games I'm involved with locally. The conclusion is that we need to focus on what tabletop does that online can't.
For me, this means that emotional investment and "deep story" moments are certainly still there for tabletop; futzing around with mechanics, or "crunch", just isn't. And it's here where I look fondly at Fudge, with its rough-hewn granularity, its lack of (native) attribute/skill linking, where right down in its bones it is really just a simple, get-out-of-the-way system that gives me just enough structure to know where I stand and get to the playing ... and I know that there's at least a little hope for the tabletop.
If anything, my motto in gaming for the better part of a decade has been "simplify, simplify", and my recent confrontation with the Electronic Beast that Walks (and games) Like A Man if anything has solidified that. Our hobby may have spawned the electronic RPG, and much of what our hobby does will, I think, be absorbed by the online world in time, but as Fudge players I say we'll still have our seven adjectives to guide and protect us in the Valley of the Shadow of the PC.
At least for now.
