A while back people were scouring the Internet looking for information on Cloverfield, the secret movie project by J.J. Abrams. I’ve blogged about the movie myself once or twice. During the hunt, people stumbled upon a site called www.ethanhaaswasright.com and a blog at ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com. The first had a flash puzzle game, each level played a small video clip. The second was a blog that had just a couple entries speaking about something coming and then turning into script that had to be deciphered. Lots of people thought this was for Cloverfield, many people insisted it, and then J.J. Abrams came out at Comic Con and said the Ethan Haas stuff had nothing to do with his movie.
So what was all this Ethan Haas stuff about?
Turns out it was all hype for Alpha Omega, a new table top RPG. Of course, many of the people who’d been trying to figure it out were disappointed, table top games just aren’t exciting to lots of people, they’d have preferred it be a new TV show or a movie, or at the very least a video game. But me, I like table top games, and this one looks fairly interesting, especially since it doesn’t appear to be based on the d20 system. As nice as I think d20 is, its not the only way to play, so I applaud anyone who goes down another road.
I also applaud the effort made here. I can’t remember the last time a table top RPG managed to garner so much attention. No wait… yes I can.
If you want more out of your MMORPGs than levels and loot and grinding experience points, I recommend trying to get some folks together to sit around the table and play. If you are nervous about it because you’ve never done it before, I recommend Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies and Dungeon Master for Dummies to give you a nice overview and a little depth on both sides of table top game play.
Besides, if you love Science Fiction setting games, the MMOs have never really gotten it right, but table top games have been doing it right for a long time.