This will be at 9pm Rome Italy time (3pm EST; 2pm CT) on my livestream. The reason I am doing this, after a fairly long absence from YouTube is because I have finally cut out a little time for it, but mostly because the modern generation seems completely lost with regards to playing pen and paper games and it’s honestly kind of sad.
Although this is not the same as playing live IRL, at least you should get a sense of the fun that can be had. The reason I think this is important were explained in this post I did about how no one realised how useful pen and paper RPGs were… until now.
So I hope you will come along and see it, the chat will be live and we hope that the rural internet will allow the 3 players and myself to run the game smoothly. Hopefully it will work. And hopefully you will see how funny and useful it can be, even if the setting is a little removed from reality, the point is that you should manage to appreciate the camaraderie, problem solving, and general hilarity that happens in really any game of this sort.
The setting will be the Dirty Old West RPG, which is literally £5 in PDF format you can print and staple together at home, so it will not break the bank. The edition in digital format linked to above has a slight update on the task resolution which is not yet appearing on the Amazon paper version, so if you want to follow along and know how the game works, get the digital version.
The mechanics are a simplified version of the ones used in Surviving the Current Zombie Apocalypse, which is available as a full colour interior on Amazon or also in PDF at the E-store, and also has a Module to introduce the game.
The reason we picked the Dirty Old West system for this livestream is that the rules are simple to learn and understand, the entire booklet is only some 31 pages and includes character sheets you can copy, innate abilities, skills and all the rules for doing things, shooting, healing, and so on.
While the system is simple and easy to learn and only requires two six-sided dice to play, the mechanics of it are pretty realistic and could be said to be “gritty”. In other words, if your character acts stupidly and rushes into danger as if he was on the set of an old A-Team TV programme (look it up you young whipper-snappers) where hails of bullets never even gave anyone a flesh wound, he is likely to go down like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the end of the film.
A little twist is that although the game is nominally set in the Wild West, nothing, and I mean nothing, prevents you from adding a little weirdness. You could, for example, re-enact the film Cowboys and Aliens, with only a little imagination. So you can keep it strictly “realistic”, or make it “possibly” a little “supernatural” (keep your players guessing, which adds a dimension of superstition and FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) which invariably means your players will make some hilarious assumptions with equally hilarious, tragic, or stupendous consequences), or you can just make it quite absurdist too, though I don’t recommend that, especially for first time players.
In order to make the game enjoyable for spectators too, I will post the map, and possibly the player characters on this blog, the day of the game, so anyone interested can follow along.
As a spectator, my hope is that you will enjoy seeing how it all works and want to create your own little gaming groups with real people around a real table, and play face to face. There are MANY reasons why this is a good thing.
First it undoes some of the isolationism we have all been subjected to in the last 4 years.
Second it creates human dynamics in real life which help socialise you in other contexts too.
Third, it forces your imagination to work, which is a VERY needed thing, especially among Gen Z. They have been so brainwashed by TV, the internet in general and the general Zeitgeist that they struggle to even imagine freedom. Although RPGs can be seen as “escapism” it is a constructive form of it. You need to participate in the creation of the story and things that happen in it.
Fourth, I designed the RPG Surviving the Current Zombie Apocalypse, precisely to start to get you to play through various hypotheticals you could design that might happen in the real world in the case of serious economic crashes, war, etc. actually happening. And in case you did not know, modelling wars is very serious business. In other words, actual real militaries around the world pretty much “play” out potential scenarios in conference rooms. Admittedly a bit more advanced than pen and paper RPGs, but the concept is the same. It forces you and the opponent to face various hypothetical situations and have to work out solutions, sometimes to seemingly impossible problems.
So I really hope to revive this hobby in at least a percentage of younger people. I plan to play these games with my children too, and my older daughter already has been exposed to it and not only enjoys it, but she comes up with hilarious, unexpected, and usually very intelligent solutions, including ones I had not foreseen or expected. I can’t wait to see what the younger ones will do in a few years.
