Interesting stuff. It doesn’t make sense to me to sell any of my 2E stuff for a price that low, I like them too much even though I still don’t play them.
A lot of those old AD&D books are available legally as PDFs which might affect the value of the originals. At one point, I think Oriental Adventures was going for as little as $5.
I played for the first time earlier this month with a group of six. The GM and my wife were the only ones who had played before, although over a decade ago I played a few rounds of CoC and one of Warhammer (not the figurine thing though.)
We’re all geographically separated and not keen on in-person group activities anyway these days. The GM had us use Roll20. I wasn’t impressed but also don’t have anything to compare it against.
FWIW, I’m DMing a game at 11th level now, and the first honest-to-god character death happened. True, it was some astonishingly poor tactics (one PC was unconscious, and another took an action that basically dropped a house on him); but I almost got another PC death in the same combat, and TBH if I’d played the enemy a little less self-preservingly, a TPK might have resulted. Making things deadly at high levels is entirely possible.
As for World of Darkness and angst, they actually made angst a mechanic in Wraith. But it could show up in other places. Werewolf was an interesting game, as the PCs could win pretty much any fight they got in, and if the storyteller wasn’t careful, it seemed like a furry superhero game. But a well-run game would make it clear that no amount of bloodshed could solve the problems of the world, and there’s yer angst right there.
My favorite WoD game was where we played versions of ourselves who would turn into various critters over the course of the game. The very first session began with us roleplaying ourselves roleplaying ourselves, and watching the GM approach the group and get murdered by a vampire. It was pretty great.
I’m really, really looking forward to returning to in-person gaming. It’s a lot harder to schedule–but oh man, it’s so much more fun to play. And it encourages roleplaying so much better: when folks can mute themselves or turn off the camera or alt-tab to another screen or whatever, it’s really hard to keep focus and have natural conversation.
Unimpressed with Roll20 or with D&D?
I loved the… source books for Wraith. I found playing it (well, running it, really) to be pretty difficult thematically with the Stygia stuff and “Hey, you’re a ghost and you probably want to solve your murder but these weird Roman guys want to turn you into cinder blocks for a wall” and the general framing of the game. But then a lot of the cool stuff, like the Guilds, didn’t really work without a society framing and who knows. But the source books are really cool!
Yeah. On the plus side, it’s helped introduce me to new games (just started a Pathfinder game and group is already talking about starting a Mutants & Masterminds game concurrently) but it just isn’t the same. It’s good and I’m happy for it and I wouldn’t be playing with most of these people otherwise but not the same.
While I can appreciate playing online, I have zero desire to run a game online. Which is too bad since I still have pre-early Covid era Kickstarter stuff coming in that will likely never get touched.
Roll20. Seemed hard for him to set up but maybe it takes time to learn.
My experience with Roll20 has been pretty mixed. It definitely has a steep learning curve, especially for the GM. If you have a group of players who are reasonably savvy with computer stuff, and have solid broadband connections, and a GM who knows Roll20 pretty well, it can actually be pretty slick.
But, in my 5E D&D group, where we’ve been solely on Roll20 for two years, due to distance and the pandemic, we have one player who’s on sketchy rural internet, and another who plays on an iPad. So, we invariably have technical issues going on, including the GM (who actually knows Roll20 reasonably well) struggling with getting the program to work right. It’s better than not playing at all, but we probably lose a portion of every game session to tech troubleshooting.
It’s not a night for us on Roll20 if, at some point, we don’t all have to spam the connection refresh to be able to hear one another again.
At some point there will be a moment of “Wait… Jack, can you even hear Mike?”
Frankly, I prefer to use Discord just for audio/video communication and do the rest the old-fashioned way. I don’t like computerized roling and online record-keeping. Just let me use my real dice and my pencil. It kind of sucks when the D.M. has a reason to believe that there might be a cheater in the group and insist on digitized play.
Same here, though I also like using a dice-rolling bot on Discord (though I wouldn’t insist on it). Discord is easier to use, more stable, and much less of a bandwidth hog than Roll20, even if you have video turned on.
The issue, with our D&D group, is that we’re playing through a WotC-published adventure arc, with lots and lots of battlemaps, and the DM feels that having the battle grids and tokens is necessary in order for him to keep track of where the characters are/where effects are. He bought the Roll20 files for this adventure arc, with all of the maps and monsters already coded in. I don’t blame him for that, but it does make playing more technologically challenging.
Isn’t that solidly in the Superhero range / genre?
I’ve been playing on Roll20 for two and a half years, on year of that as DM, and my experience seems to be much better than yours. Sure, there was a bit of a learning curve, but we’ve pretty much mastered it by now. I love using battle grids and tokens, I love having all of the game information available at my fingertips, with no need to start digging through books, and I especially love the ability to enhance the game with stuff I find online, like maps and images - about half my prep time is scouring Google Images for just the right concept art for the NPCs they’re going to meet.
I suppose it helps that there’s just three of us, and we all have PCs with good internet connections. But I can’t imagine playing D&D without a computer now. How could I come up with NPC names on the fly without the Fantasy Name Generator tab being open in my browser?
That’s what you would miss? The one thing I never needed help with was making up names.
Now I know I’m nerdy - I prepared all the names in advance… 
Wait, you never have random encounters and suddenly the party is negotiating with the humanoids and asking their name comes up?
I either don’t do random encounters like that. Or, I am confident in my pre-installed organic name generation function … in my brain.
Oh, I do too - names and backgrounds and character portraits. It’s just that sometimes the players suddenly decide to ask me the name of that bartender over there, or decide that they need to consult an alchemist or something like, right now, and if I try to improvise a name on the spot, it’ll probably be something like either “Caranthyr the Red” or “Bob”. So I just flick open the tab and say, “So he tells you his name is, um,…[clickclickclick]… Rylon Brax. Write it down!”
I was asking Glee, he said he had all the names in advanced. I usually use the my pre-installed organic name generation function also.
I wasn’t even thinking about A/V issues but yes, it’s way clunkier than Discord.
As someone unfamiliar with the game, it’s nice to have some automated record keeping, but I’m not sure if he has our character sheets loaded in or if that’s even an option. He did use some gridded maps. Stuff I’d played before didn’t bother so much with distance and movement. But we also didn’t have much combat in the other games I played.