Wow! Just wow. I just wrapped up an awesome gaming session that had a little something for everyone; nostalgia for an old gaming system, good times with an old friend, a cool miniature and it was all the more enjoyable because I just played a two-hour RPG session with a friend who lives on the other side of the country.
Awhile back my buddy Darren proposed playing an RPG together over the Internet. I've always liked that idea but every time someone has tried to get that off the ground before it has failed, primarily because the tool or tools we were trying to use to execute our plan just didn't work. Darren directed me to http://roll20.net which is a web utility for playing RPGs and it is fantastic. Simple, intuitive and allows you to do everything a group of gamers sitting around a table can do except pass each other snacks and drinks.
Tonight we played Top Secret S.I. an action/espionage game that was produced back in the TSR days and holds up surprisingly well. Typically one of the problems I have with older RPGs is that a lot of them just seem to have way more rules than are actually necessary to play a game. Basically Top Secret works on a system of percentages for skill rolls and works pretty smoothly. It actually reminds me of a less crunchy version of Dark Heresy.
Even though we were playing over the net I did paint (touch up actually) a figure for my character which only seemed fitting as one of Roll20s primary tools is the ability to use a map to represent the action. My character is a fairly generic agent and I had just gotten a perfect figure in the SHIELD Agent for the recent Winter Soldier Heroclix set.
This set is great because in addition to providing me with a character I needed for an RPG it's full of SHIELD agents that match the look of the Marvel Cinematic Universe characters so if that was ever something I wanted to game I should be able to loot at least a half-dozen interesting and appropriate figures for the set.
-Jay
