Episode: 2390
Title: HPR2390: Still in the game
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2390/hpr2390.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:09:53

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This in HPR episode 2,390 entitled, still in the game, and in part of the series, Tabletop
Gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and in about 24 minutes long, and Karima Clean Flag.
The summer is, Klaatu Compared PC and Tabletop Gaming.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code, HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hi, this is Klaatu.
This is AgriPublic Radio.
This is my Tabletop RPG gaming series, and this episode is not about Tabletop RPGs.
Hey, this is part 2 more or less of the previous episode, so it's kind of the counterpoint
to my previous episode, which was about how Tabletop RPGs are the best and nothing compares
and they're the ultimate gaming experience.
And actually, this isn't a complete counterpoint because it actually follows along that same
path.
I believe that RPGs, Tabletop RPGs, are the ultimate gaming experience, or the ultimate
RPG experience.
Let's put it that way, because I mean, card games are ultimate gaming experience as well,
but they're just card games instead.
So in terms of RPG, if you're looking for that sort of traditional, I've got a character
and I'm going to give them skills, and then as I progress through an adventure, I'm going
to add skills to them and build up my character.
If we call that RPG, the RPG process, or RPG-like thing, then the RPG Tabletop is the best
version of that.
However, I do believe that PC games, PC RPGs, have their place in the world, and here
is why.
First of all, they're a great intro to RPGs.
I mean, if you've never played a Tabletop RPG, and a lot of people haven't, for one reason
or another, there's a little bit of a stigma about them, maybe they're evil, maybe they're
too geeky for you, maybe they're too social for you, whatever.
If you've never played one, then PC gaming, PC RPG-ing is kind of the best way to get involved
in RPG, if you can't do it the other way, right?
I mean, it's kind of like, oh, I want to do this thing, but I'm not going to do it in
real life for whatever reason, so I will do it on a computer.
So I will simulate the simulation.
So you get to have that RPG experience on a computer, and that's a great reason to
do it, because if you have no clue what a character class is, then if you play a PC-based
RPG, you're probably going to soon learn what a class is, like what's the difference between
a class and a race.
If you don't know that, then you'll find out once you start building your little character
in your PC game.
I mean, play one, you just get started on like, never winter nights or something like that,
and you're there.
You'll suddenly, you will be very familiar with at least the concept of what it means
to build a character or to create a character.
So it's no small feat, I think, to introduce people to the concept of RPG.
And a lot of modern adults, I think, within the computer community, I should say, have
been around enough computers and enough computer games to have experienced an RPG or RPG-like
game or experience.
So a lot of us, I think, are basically familiar with it.
But there are subtler things, you know, like there are things like alignment.
I mean, alignment is classically RPG-wise, it's classically, it's like this big thing.
And if you don't know that it's this big thing, and I'm making hand motions that you
can't see, but it's this big sort of hairy thing, you know, it's like, it's big and fluffy
and nebulous, nebulous is the actually the word I was looking for.
And a lot of people, I mean, there are big philosophical debates about what it means,
like what it even means alignment, what does that even have to do with anything?
And it basically doesn't even affect the game all that much in terms of mechanics.
There are little tiny places where alignment will actually hard and fast affect the outcome
of a simulation, of a simulated thing.
But generally speaking, alignment doesn't affect all that much, it's more about, it's
like 80% backstory and 20% mechanic.
So if you have no idea about that, then you might start to sort of learn about it in a
computer RPG, because you might be asked, like if it follows the D&D rule set, which
a lot of the early RPGs, like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, and Neverwinternites,
even Dragon's Age to some degree, they kind of make a, you know, if they follow that
rule set, then they will make mention at least of alignment, and you might find that certain
choices constrain a certain path that you could or could not go along.
So that's important, and you will get introduced to that idea through the magical, wonderful
world of PC gaming.
So that is a very valid reason to play PC RPGs.
The other one, and I'm kind of doing this in the order, I think, that they kind of almost
matter to me.
So the next really great reason for it is that PC games, PC RPG, very, very low commitment,
right?
I mean, you can play a, you can fire up an RPG game at any moment during the day on your
computer.
It doesn't matter, it's not like you don't have to keep an appointment, you don't have
to schedule it, you don't have to make sure that everyone's available at that time.
You don't have to go through the whole week thinking, okay, well Thursday night, I got
to be at my computer RPG game, and then only to find on Thursday afternoon that everyone
had to cancel because of some event in the city.
So I mean, it's, the PC experience is easy, it's low commitment, low barrier to entry,
you fire up a Linux computer, you put a game onto it from either god.com or something
from Steam, and you're playing an RPG, and you can stop and start at any time you want.
You can walk away from that game for three months, I speak from experience, three months.
You go back, it's exactly where you left off, and every, but no one's noticed that you've
been gone.
You do that in real life.
I imagine a little bit less forgiving, people will be like, oh my gosh, you're back.
Where have you been for the past three months?
We had to kill your character because you didn't show back up.
So yeah, computer RPGs are really nice for that sort of, gee, I really want to play an
RPG, but I don't have the time or I don't have, I kind of want to say I don't want to
have the friends, but I honestly, I think that's an overstated, I think that's a,
over, I think that's all in people's head, the whole, oh, I don't have enough friends
to play an RPG, a real, the tabletop RPG with, and to that I say, I'll bet you do, you
just haven't asked, and you probably are over, over estimating how many friends you actually
need to get a tabletop RPG going, because I've seen people play one, like between two
people, a DM and a player, and that's all you really need.
Traditionally, you'd have more, but you don't have to have more.
So anyway, PC games, I'm not going to say, oh, they save you from not having any friends,
but they do save you from a social experience.
If you don't want to have a social experience, you don't want to play a tabletop RPG, again,
I would say you should try it anyway, even though you think you don't want the social
experience, speaking from experience, it's not as bad as it sounds, like I, look, if you
told me I was going to be playing an RPG with a bunch of people who, the only thing we
have in common, really, is an interest in RPG.
I'd have thought you were crazy, but I mean, that's what I do on a regular basis.
I play RPGs with people who, I mean, they're even window users, like there's some people
who aren't even Linux users in this group that I play with, and it's crazy, and it works,
and I would have never thought that that was possible, but it is possible to actually
communicate with other people and to interact with them in person, as long as there's something
worthwhile to kind of distract you from the fact that you're having to deal with other
people, like an RPG.
So I guess what I'm really saying is that, for me, at least, it all boils down to the
time commitment.
You don't want to schedule something at a certain time on a certain day, or you don't
want to have to worry about, you know, coordinating schedules, PC RPGs are your friend in that
regard.
Now, another one, another great thing about PC RPGs, and this is a little bit related
to them being a safe gateway into the world of RPGs.
There's also the fact that PC RPGs introduce you to the actual processes behind the RPG
game itself.
The mechanics, I should say.
And as I think I've mentioned this in the previous episode as a critique of PC games,
I will say that the flip side of that same coin is that a PC game may not show you each
and every role.
They might not show you everything that's happening, and you might not truly have a sense
of, well, why when I hit this monster with 18, it didn't even flinch, and I didn't hit
it.
Like, why is that?
And then my friend over there hit it with 16, and it took full damage.
The computer won't ever really tell you that, and you can't really possibly find that
out.
I mean, maybe you can on like really old games where they're following D&D so closely
that you can literally just pick up a second edition, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons book,
and look up that particular monster that you faced off, and see, oh, I see.
It had fire resistance, and I was attacking it with a fire-based weapon, and this other
person was attacking it with, you know, some special kind of elven steel to which it has
a distinct weakness.
Okay, well, that makes sense.
And that's the kind of thing, in a tabletop RPG, it's very transparent, and I mentioned
that last time, whereas in the PC game, yeah, it usually doesn't really, it never really
exactly tell.
And honestly, you probably wouldn't have even noticed you'd have thought, wow, that
was a long and hard battle, but all five of my characters that I'm controlling have
really defeated that big animal, and two of them fell, but now that we're out of combat,
they got back up, and they're okay, so who cares?
And that's kind of like the thought process, you know, you don't really, and maybe you
see the numbers fly up, and, you know, oh, you hit them with 18 points of damage, three
points of damage, whatever.
But I don't think that there's realistically, especially in an RPG where traditionally
you do PCR to PG, you traditionally have like four or five party members that you're
basically controlling as a group, and you just don't have the opportunity to sit back
and look at the input that's happening, whereas in a tabletop RPG, you do.
However, that said, you still are seeing that there's a process to it all, you know,
you still see that there's a certain mechanical advantage that you might have if you have
your ranged attack person hide behind the boulder and strike from afar, and your healer
hide behind them, and heal people as they go down, and then your two brutes rush and
go in from either side, flanking the opponent.
You know, you get a sense for like all of these sort of tactical and kind of, I don't
even know if it's tactical, but just the fact that, you know, like tabletop RPG players
often just sort of say things out of off the cuff, you know, just like, oh, well, you're
a caster, so you should do such and such, and you don't know what that means if you haven't
played some PC RPGs first, possibly, or you just started playing tabletop RPGs and learned
as you go, but if you play the PC RPG, you can kind of learn a lot of that stuff.
You can kind of get these ideas in your head of, well, I don't really want to send in
a bard to do such and such, because that's not really their strong point.
They should stay over here, and they should inspire the others to give them bonuses when
they do the really hard attack and, you know, the tough attack, and so on.
So you get an idea for the possibilities given a certain set of tools.
That's how I'll say that.
So it's a useful learning experience, and it's a lot of practice, and you just kind of
get used to it.
You get used to things.
You get used to tropes, really.
You get used to the things that just all, certainly all, most fantasy based RPGs are going
to take for granted, or maybe you're playing a sci-fi one, and then again, you're learning
things that most sci-fi RPGs are going to kind of take for granted, because there's
only a certain number of mechanics out there for gaming, right?
So the more you kind of encounter them in one setting or another, the more you get used
to them, and then when you approach a game, you have that kind of in your back pocket.
Related to that, a little bit more specialized though, but related still, is the fact that
a PC RPG may frequently, and this is, as I say, this is very specific, but it may frequently
follow the set, follow some rule set, of a tabletop RPG.
So certainly a lot of the fantasy based RPGs, especially the early ones, they follow sometimes
very strictly the Dungeons and Dragons, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule books.
So everything happens only as it would on a tabletop RPG, maybe you're not seeing it
all happen that way, but that's what's happening.
So in addition to the rule sets being followed, the actual universe, the world in which it
all takes place is being followed.
So you start learning things, you start learning the names of important cities in that world,
you start learning of certain legendary heroes in that world, that any character in that
world would reasonably be very impressed if they were to meet, or if you found a blade
that had been blessed by this legendary figure or this god, you'd be really excited about
that, and it would be important to you, or you would know to pay special attention to
it, that kind of thing.
So it's basically sort of the lore, I guess, or the history, or just the culture of a certain
world.
And I'm speaking very specifically about Dungeons and Dragons and about the Forgotten
Realms, because that's a lot of the stuff out there is pretty much based on the Forgotten
Realms of Dungeons and Dragons.
I mean, there's so many books, R.A. Salvatore has written, and others have written in
that setting, and then there are video games, and then there are tabletop RPGs.
So it's a very, it's kind of like if you think Star Wars, yeah, you can basically think
that about Dungeons and Dragons, except I think it's a little bit cleaner in Dungeons and
Dragons, they don't have like, you know, the five different levels of canon that Star
Wars has.
It's just all basically, you know, the Forgotten Realms, and it's pretty much all standardized.
But you know, and you can learn the Forgotten Realms, you can learn about that through,
like I say, either books, or playing the tabletop RPG, or in a pinch, play a PC RPG based
in the Forgotten Realms, like Boulder's Gate, Never Winter, Icewind Dale, probably others
that I'm not thinking of right now.
So yeah, they're great for that, they're great for brushing up on the culture of a specific
world, if that world also exists in tabletop.
And even something like Pillars of Eternity, which is, which it was kickstarted some years
ago now, and now they've got a second one coming out, again, from kickstarter.
But even that, you kind of have, like after their second kickstarter, they decided to release
a tabletop version of their computer game pretty much.
So, so once again, you're kind of learning about the world through the computer, and then
you can take all of your knowledge and apply it to something in real life.
Well, in a simulated real life, but you will be experiencing that simulation in real life.
So that's a good thing, that's kind of my fourth point about why PC RPGs are still relevant
in light of how amazing tabletop RPGs are.
And the other one is, the fifth point I'm going to go with, probably the wrong term,
and I'm going to say that they're immersive.
And when I say that they're immersive, I don't actually mean that they're any more immersive
than a tabletop RPG.
You might think, well, if I'm just sitting around a table, you know, and if you go full
cliche, you'll be like, if I'm just sitting around the table with sweaty geeks and or
sweaty nerds and munching on chips, you know, how immersive can that be?
And I'm not going to don like a elf ears and a cloak to try to, you know, get more immersed
into this world.
But amazingly, it doesn't take any of those things that you can actually sit around a
table with friends and talk your way through a tabletop RPG and be completely, completely
in that world.
I mean, it's just the amount of imagination is just profound, it's just the power of
imagination is profound, I guess.
And you can kind of think if you're a bookish sort of person, you might think about it
in, you know, sort of movie versus book kind of scenario.
So sometimes the movies are really, really good, sometimes they're better than the books.
But a lot of times the books are really, really good.
And especially if you read the book before you see the movie, your brain is just fully
in the book, right?
I mean, you're just, you're just sitting there, you're just engrossed in this, in this
world contained on these pages.
And maybe people go by, they walk through the room, maybe they even say something to
you, hey, what do you want for dinner?
And you're like, yep, mm-hmm, yeah, and they're like, no, I said, what did you want for
dinner?
And then you look up from the book, oh, yeah, right, such and such.
That's how engrossing a book can be, and you really get just taken away, which if you
told that to someone who'd never experienced either, if you'd said, hey, you know, books
are cool or movies are cool, which one would you like?
They won't know.
So you're saying, well, the books are actually a lot better.
Believe it or not, these books, the thing with just paper and ink, it'll just absolutely
blow your mind.
I mean, and then you say, oh, but, or you can watch a movie, which will have music and
it'll have visuals and it'll have actors and it'll have words and sound.
And you get to watch it and it only takes two hours.
This book, it's just paper and ink, you're going to sit down wherever you sit really
and it's going to take you a full day, two days, a week, depends on how fast you read
it.
And it's going to take you so much more immersive.
They would just think you're crazy.
Like there's no way that a book could be more engrossing than a movie.
And yet we all know that the books are actually very frequently the more evocative way of experiencing
something.
They're just, it all, it leaves it all up to your head and you just, you just run away
with it.
You're just, you're gone.
Your brain just takes you to places that no one else could have thought of and frankly,
it would have been too tough to put on a movie and make interesting anyway on a movie
screen.
So I think the RPG versus PC game thing is the same thing.
So you might say that the RPG on tabletop is definitely, I would say, more immersive
than anything else.
And yet that doesn't mean the PC game can't be immersive as well.
It has a different set of features that it's going to bring to the table.
It's got the music.
Hopefully it's good.
A lot of video game music is actually quite good.
It's a lot better than movie soundtracks right now.
Maybe it has voice acting.
Maybe not.
Maybe it's just got a bunch of screens that you have to read almost like my book analogy.
And maybe it's got really beautiful environments that you get to explore, you know, and, and
you're, you're, you're, you're leading your character down these paths and you just can't
stop wondering like, what's beyond that tree?
Just up ahead.
Then you go up to the tree and you find out that it's actually just a texture of a tree
and you can't actually turn the corner because the video game programmers didn't account
for that too bad there's not a version of RPGs where that wouldn't be a problem.
But I mean, really, you know, you, the PC games, you've got lots of things to, you got
a lot of sensory stimulus that kind of, that will entertain you in different ways than
a tabletop RPG.
And that's exciting.
It should be exciting.
It's, it's a form of art.
It's really amazing that programmers can do this.
So it's well worth exploring, obviously.
That's a great reason to play our PC RPG is, is to, is to go explore a virtual world that
you can see and hear, whereas tabletop RPGs less, less, less since, less, less sensory
stimulus and, and a lot more just kind of pure imagination.
Anyway, you should check out tabletop RPGs.
Now that I've told you why PC RPGs are great or, or are still relevant, I should say.
And I, I will say that a lot of the really great old school RPG games on PC are available
on God.com.
So if you do want to play them on Linux, you pretty much can.
And then, of course, there's new ones coming out all the time.
And a lot of them are coming to Linux as well.
So it's a pretty good time to be a PC game, a Linux PC gamer, because obviously there are
more games on Linux now than ever before.
So I guess that's the other reason that they're relevant is because they're on your OS.
They're actually on the thing that you're using.
Which is fantastic.
Believe me, I do all of my gaming on Linux.
It's really cool.
It's a lot of fun, and I don't have to worry about buying a console or running an OS
that I wouldn't want to run.
So there you go.
That's my, that's my discussion of PC RPGs.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Hey, maybe next time I will review a tabletop RPG system or two.
Talk about the good ones that are out there, because there are lots out there.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
Talk to you later.
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