Favorite board game obsessions of recent years part 1 - Talisman started it all

 Some time in 2019 after I moved to my new town and had gotten a nice little D&D group together (my first real dabbling in DMing 5th edition) I also started getting into a variety of board games in a way I never had before.

Outside of typical board games of my childhood (Monopoly, Clue, etc) I had really gotten into Talisman in the 90's. I mean, really into it. My buddy had a girlfriend who's roommate had the basic board and the dungeon. At our height of play I might go over for the weekend, surfing the couch, and we would play Friday night, finish that game the next morning, start another in the afternoon to finish that night, and then start a new game Sunday morning after breakfast (starting our days drinking with some Mimosa) to finish that late afternoon. We were bonkers for it. I eventually bought a used copy of the game and the dungeon of my own, and played it with folk all over the rest of the 90's.

Talisman had a ton of elements I loved. A bevy of fantasy characters with varied abilities to play; a ton of things that could happen based on encounters and event cards (very often game changing); and most games you could finish in about three hours. 

 Then in the early 2000's I pretty much retired from RPG's and gaming in general for several years, and my copy of Talisman went into the closet with my D&D stuff. 

In my later long running  group that lasted from around 2008 till I left Los Angeles in 2018, I think I only had maybe one or two occasions to break Talisman out from hibernation. But the one time we actually played a boardgame as an RPG alternative was Arkham Horror. I don't even recall which player had a copy. I mostly just recall what a long night it was. The game was so complicated and dense (far more than I felt it needed to be) I found it hard to enjoy despite loving Call of Cthulhu. That was about it for boardgames until I moved to this town almost three years ago. Then I met B and L. 

They were a local couple who I met off a local shops Facebook page because they wanted to play D&D, and pretty soon they had a adopted me (I didn't really know many people in town and hadn't been working yet) and were my besties pretty quick. Besides us having a D&D group for several months, we also started playing boardgames. They were already avid board gamers, being frequent visitors to a local bar that stocked games. There besides a bevy of microbrews, you could pull any number of their hundreds of boardgames off the shelf and play it. They have everything. 

But they had not played Talisman before, and after I first pulled out that old beat-up copy, they fell in love with it. Soon they had the most recent edition (that was by then several years old). I'll be posting about some other faves soon, but here I'll talk about the most amazing discovery of all that is Talisman related: Digital Talisman.

I had just made some offhanded Facebook post about Talisman, and a friend in Sacramento mentioned that there was a digital edition on steam. Zuh?!

I had no Steam experience, but within minutes I had an account and bought Talisman and a few of its expansions. Oh man, how amazing. This was an incredible discovery. Not just the main game, but they had a ton of the expansions. For physical copies this would all be about a thousand dollars if you could even find them. But on Steam the main game was like 6.99, and the expansions were that or less! Many of these weren't even available in physical form. Of all the fucked up things that happened in 2020, discovering digital Talisman was a highlight. And I have friends who love it as well. B and L left town to travel around the country in a huge luxury mobile home. But whenever they are somewhere they can get decent cell phone coverage for hot spots they are up for a game. You can even play it solo with the software running other characters (fairly intelligently as well). 

There are few downsides to this version. Of course there can be a glitch here and there, but rarely game breaking. And so far if you play a game online that game will be erased if you play another one before you finish. So you have to make sure you have plenty of time to finish. 

The upgrade in my Talisman playing has in a way changed my gaming habits. Digital Talisman, as well as the MMO Elder Scrolls Online (will post about that later) have in large part overtaken my desire to run D&D. These days there are just too many options.

Fudging Dice Rolls

 

Fudging dice rolls is an issue that many old schoolers particularly take offense at. They tend to be all about "the purity of the dice" and "why bother rolling at all then?" Though I would not say I have never fudged a roll, I can't think of a time in recent years I did, though I can think of a few I wish I had in retrospect.

 In my last long time group, as opposed to previous long running groups made up of people I already knew who were often not that versed in RPG's, I had at least a couple of power gaming or min maxing players come along who tended to take advantage of my general good nature as a player friendly DM. As soon as they saw I had sympathy for players characters and that I almost always gave their situations the benefit of a doubt, if not a special save to give at least a small chance at avoiding perma-death, they took on the personas of jackals who sensed a wounded lamb (player character friendly DM). Yeah, give some an inch and they'll take a mile. 

These are often mooks who don't really care about anybody else's fun, especially the beleaguered DM. They just wanted strong players characters who were more powerful than anybody else. For whatever reason this is the fun they got out of the game. For whatever lacked in their real lives, power or whatever (now that I think of it the wives of these dudes seemed to call the shots in their lives), they had to be bullies in an elf game. But it wasn't just for the reasonable, "fun for all" players that I was a friendly GM. Whatever the case, I was fair to all. But yeah, a few times I wished I wasn't.

But OK, I'm not here to complain about former players I often wished I had dice-fudged to death. But on the issue of DM fudging, I think there is often a deeper issue at large here. Maybe more insidious, and it's something I've noticed since I was a kid in other people's game. 

You see, since I was a teen GM back in the day, I had a tendency to randomize the world in general. Most often in the case of NPC decisions. I called it my "yes no maybe" method. Kayhla the Hobbit speaks to an innkeeper and asks if they can get a free meal along with their room for the night because the party is low on funds. I think most DM's would just say yes or no depending on how they personally felt in that moment. But for me I would put that to a roll. If I had actually imagined a certain personality for this innkeeper, I would make a modifier. Is he cheap? Or is he generous? What is Kayhla's charisma? Then modify the roll. Easy enough. Well, OK, I'm sure plenty of DM's just did btb reaction rolls. But really, the rare times I sat as a player I pretty much never saw such rolls.  OK, that's a fairly petty example, but you can apply that to much more.

Many DM's in my experience, my entire life, just seem to run much of the game out of their head. Mostly in terms of NPC decisions. Players pose something to an NPC, and the DM just yeah or nay's it. He decides from whole cloth what the NPC will do, how they will react. Pretty much based on his own biases. Sure, he or she might have a personality in mind for the NPC that can sway that decision. But it is still a DM decision. No die roll. It comes out of his conscious or subconscious. Out of his head. An example of one of the times I did this was as a teen. One of my players girlfriends wanted to try and play, and long story short the characters had to go to the cities fireworks factory (every game city should have a fireworks factory, in whatever genre) and get some fireworks. They are very expensive, and money was an issue. The new player had her character, a good looking woman, try to flirt a major discount from the guy. Since he was quite old (and I was quite young) I just hand waved that the guy had no libido and would not be interested. OK, again, I was young. The guy may not have still had an active sex drive, but he still might be swayed by a flirtatious young lady. I really should have put it to a roll. But no, I just decided out of my head how he would act. Long story short, the gal player was very miffed, kind of embarrassed at the failure, and quit the game right there. Sure, she could have been a little more understanding and not have overreacted so much. But it stuck with me. I gipped her, and my session, out of a cute little interaction.  And that has stuck with me, and one of the reason's I believe in at least a chance of something happening. 

It is probably a minor issue for most. To be honest any player I have had that I told I like to randomize even minor things in my setting for the sake of getting close to a living breathing world that doesn't entirely come out of my brain, they never seem to care much.  But I think that outside of the rare times there is a 100% chance an NPC would or would not do something (somebody very against sexual assault will almost for sure not commit it. Somebody who is anti-violence will almost for sure not punch a child who tried to pickpocket them) there should be some chance at variances.  Almost nothing should be an absolute. One of the things I love about the concept of The Matrix, is that the simulated world has to seem real; it has verisimilitude outside of some of the crazy powers the strongest individuals (or programs) have. If you get in street fight and you are one of the "unenlightened" then basic rules of physics are happening. What is going on is actually just a bunch of computer code dictating everything.  But that code is aimed at giving a sense of a living world. I really like to think of a game world in those terms. And randomization is one of the big factors of that IMHO.

Fighting and other action pieces are in large part dictated by random rolls. Chances are modified by various factors (strength, skill, dexterity, weapon, etc). Why should the non-action stuff not be dictated by randomness to some degree or another? If not, then IMO its very similar to fudging those action dice.