If I’d known that facebook’s attraction to me would be as a game platform, I would’ve tried it a lot sooner. Yeah yeah, you can meet up with high school friends (I hadn’t talked to them in a decade; trust me, they weren’t being elusive), connect to people with similar interests (agoraphobia and hermitism, but you see the problem…), and learn about diverse products and services (because I’m not marketed to nearly enough). No, it turns out that what facebook holds for me is Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures.
Tiny Adventures is less like an RPG and more like a slightly more interactive Progress Quest. You choose a character class/race combo, which matters very little; it’s not like the wizard casts spells while the rogue sneak attacks or anything like that. No, there’s a bit of a stat difference between every class, and there are some equipment differences (no heavy armor on your wizard, but they use orbs) but otherwise adventures are going to play out the same.
And how is it that they play out, you ask? Blindingly simple. You choose an adventure; let’s pick “Glacier of the Frost Giant.” Different adventures have different numbers of encounters to them, up to (I think) 20. Each encounter has a cute bit of descriptive text to it, and then you make a skill check against a difficulty number. So, when I encounter the deathrattle viper in encounter 1, I have to make a Wisdom check on a d20 against a difficulty of 15. I’ll get to add my Wisdom bonus (I’m not explaining all of D&D to you…) as well as any bonuses that might be provided by my magical equipment. Win or lose, I’m shown results (damage received, treasure found, experience points earned) and then a timer ticks down to the next encounter.
That timer is the beauty of the whole thing. There’s anywhere from 5 minutes to more than 16 minutes before you can see the results of the next encounter. In that time you might tweak your equipment (take off the +2 DEX boots to put on your +3 CHA slippers) but otherwise you simply go do something else until the clock strikes “0:00.” Why would you change your equipment out? Well, different encounter terrains favor different skill checks, and you can replay adventures so you may very well remember that a CHA-heavy environment is coming up.
Treasure Chest in Action, click to enlarge.
Alternately, you can make use of two very important additional tools (at least, if you’re planning to geek out on D&D:TA). One is the fan wiki, which keeps comprehensive information on adventures, encounters, classes, loot… everything, basically. The other, at least if you’re using firefox, is a greasemonkey script called Treasure Chest that, among other things, drops helpful encounter reminders right into your TA page. Other tidbits of fun are the ability to buff your friends, providing universal +1 bonuses to their checks, and multi-generational advancement: when you character reaches 11th level they are retired, and your next char starts with a progression of benefits for you having retired increasing numbers of characters.
By the by, if anybody plays and wants to friend-up for mutual buffing (particularly if you use Treasure Chest, I don’t get buffed a tenth of the times that I buff others) post it here and we’ll hook up.
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