Just Take Your Turn Already!A Rant by AJ Reardon
|
|
In an attempt to be a more positive person, I've been keeping my rants private these days. No going off on my blog, or on a forum, or in a CT column. But this is something that has been bugging me for months, if not a year, and I figured I could make sure that the Opinion section wasn't empty for our awesome anniversary issue. So here you go! To my dear fellow gamers: please do not wait until your initiative rolls around to decide what your character is doing. Please pay attention to the combat during other players' turns, instead of sitting there telling WoW stories*. Please look up your special attack ahead of time. Please, just take your turn already! Maybe this just happens in my group. In fact, I hope that it does, and that no one else has to put up with this garbage. But it seems like every combat takes about three to four times as long as it should, because no one pays attention or thinks ahead or has any idea what their character can do. Honestly, is it THAT hard? In a group with more than half a dozen people, you have plenty of time to look over your character sheet, assess your capabilities, think about the opponents at hand, and choose a course of action. You may even have time to come up with a backup plan, in case the enemy you were planning to attack is felled by the guy ahead of you in the initiative. You see, for me the appeal of roleplaying is in the character interaction, problem solving, and furthering of the story. Combat long ago lost its interest for me, especially since lately I haven't been playing combat-oriented characters. In D&D, I play the healer. Combat for me boils down to buffing everyone at the start and keeping an eye out to see who is in need of a big healing spell. Despite it being boring, I always pay attention so that when my turn comes around, all I might have to do before acting is double-check on who looks more injured. Then I roll my dice, total up the amount that I healed, and bam! My turn is done. Then the next person can go. Now isn't that nice? How bad is this problem? Well, in my mid-week game, we have a player who's even more impatient than me. The GM instituted a mock rule where if you take too long, it becomes the impatient player's turn instead. If only he made it into a real house rule, maybe people would stop spending 5 minutes dithering over whether to put their free raises into attack or damage. Well, that was strangely therapeutic! * Yes, I do in fact complain about WoW stories in almost every single gaming column. If certain people would realize that not all of us play, and we really don't care what happened when your warrior got possessed, and would shut up, the world would be a happier place.
|
| [Back to Collector Times] |
| [Prev.] | [Return to Opinion] | [Disclaimer] | [Next] |
E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.com
|