The early hours with this game were fantastic. I was playing with a friend, just one session every week like a real tabletop game, and loving every minute of it. It felt like every little corner of the game had been mapped out to bring all the creativity of a game with a real DM to a place with all the luxuries of a video game. We were role-playing and the game was rewarding us for it, we were winning fights by locking enemies in burning rooms and dropping chandeliers on their heads, and we were meeting new friends and doing sidequests left and right.
But as the game wore on, all this wore thin. Although the combat remained tactically deep and interesting, the room for lateral thinking narrowed—or perhaps just the lateral angles were too much the same as before. The NPC quests became rote "check in with everyone every time you rest", and the sidequests started feeling less like we were playing with a DM and more like we were struggling to find the exact right verb in an adventure game.
It all finally came crashing down in the Act 2 to 3 transition. Without going to deep into spoilers, we tried to follow up on roleplay we'd been doing the entire time (following crumbs laid by the game!) and it just categorically refused us. It broke our investment in our characters and in the large-scale plot, and once we found ourselves in the environs of the city surrounded by mountains of NPCs who largely had nothing going on we just checked out.
It only took another session or two before I said, "hey what if we didn't play this anymore?" and my friend said, "yeah I was thinking the same thing." Maybe there's just too much game here to make all of it good. Maybe the first few hours sell the player more than it's possible to make good on. Maybe D&D 5e is just not a good ruleset for this kind of thing. Probably some combination of all these and more! Either way, I'm feeling pretty burnt out on this game.
But as the game wore on, all this wore thin. Although the combat remained tactically deep and interesting, the room for lateral thinking narrowed—or perhaps just the lateral angles were too much the same as before. The NPC quests became rote "check in with everyone every time you rest", and the sidequests started feeling less like we were playing with a DM and more like we were struggling to find the exact right verb in an adventure game.
It all finally came crashing down in the Act 2 to 3 transition. Without going to deep into spoilers, we tried to follow up on roleplay we'd been doing the entire time (following crumbs laid by the game!) and it just categorically refused us. It broke our investment in our characters and in the large-scale plot, and once we found ourselves in the environs of the city surrounded by mountains of NPCs who largely had nothing going on we just checked out.
It only took another session or two before I said, "hey what if we didn't play this anymore?" and my friend said, "yeah I was thinking the same thing." Maybe there's just too much game here to make all of it good. Maybe the first few hours sell the player more than it's possible to make good on. Maybe D&D 5e is just not a good ruleset for this kind of thing. Probably some combination of all these and more! Either way, I'm feeling pretty burnt out on this game.