Get your game on at BoB

If there’s one thing geeks enjoy as much as, if not more than, reading, it’s gaming. And gaming online is a big business (just ask the folks behind EverQuest). But some of us enjoy a bit of an old-school touch for our online gaming.

Enter the Band of Brothers Simming Association. This is a set of “sims” (individual games) that run the gamut from an 18th-century Royal Navy ship to Star Wars, from the Civil War to Battlestar Galactica. And of course, the ever-popular Star Trek ship-based sims are heavily represented.

Band of Brothers differs from other gaming associations or fleets because they don’t try to run things from the top down. Requirements for a sim to join Band of Brothers are very light, and the leadership of BoB doesn’t dictate how a sim should be run. This lets the game masters have a lot of freedom to try different things to see how they work.

Most of the sims are heavily character-driven and very light on dice rolls. Essentially, the players create a character (sometimes more than one), and then the game master puts them in a situation, and the player writes what the character does. It’s a lot like cooperative writing, with each author writing the part of one character, but what makes it interesting is that you don’t always know what the other character is going to do (sometimes characters do arrange for a given scene in advance).

It’s harder to explain than it is to do, trust me, and the simmers have all been new at this at one time themselves, so they’re really a helpful bunch of people. They also have a very friendly forum where simmers get together and discuss… well, pretty much anything that comes to their minds!

If you have a love of sci-fi or fantasy, and would like to create a character for one of your favorite worlds, give Band of Brothers a look, they’re likely to have a sim to fit your taste — and if they don’t, ask around, you might find others that are also interested in setting up a sim like that.