I played a game!

I played Star Wars (D6 -- there can be only one) tonight, with about a bazillion people.

Schedule:

10:00 PM - everybody's shown up by now.
10:30 PM - by now everyone has characters done (most of us had made them a week before)
11:45 PM - people are done socializing and being the dorks we are and the game actually begins. Scene is set. Background is given. Mission is set out. We decide how to tackle it.
12:30 or so AM - First encounter: bunch of stormtroopers show up and we start a combat. (Well, technically I started the combat, by refusing to actually hide as opposed to taking cover but keeping my gun out and aimed at them as they came down the stairs...)
2:00 AM -- combat ends with an AT-ST coming in as backup and dropping gas canisters into the area, after we beat the stuffing out of the stormtroopers, so we run away. Out of game time; skill points are handed out.

I played as maximally combat-monstered a character as I could -- a bounty hunter, with maximal blaster skill for a starting character (6D). But I never actually hit anybody in combat, at all.

Once it was because of a really bad roll, but after that it was mostly just that I went after all the stormtroopers in initiative order (which doesn't change from round to round), and I kept getting stunned-for-the-rest-of-the-round every combat round before I got a chance to act. (Once by a grenade thrown by a fellow player that he didn't throw far enough, the rest of the time by the stormtroopers.)

Sometimes when you're doing the indie game thing you get all nostalgic for traditional games, but stuff like that is a little reminder of why people decided to try to reach out in different directions.

For all that, I had a lot of fun just being with the guys and playing. I'm really glad I did it, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Being in a room with a bunch of people you like, rolling dice and imagining things is fun, even if your character can't actually do the things he's supposed to be really good at, and you accomplish very little throughout the course of the evening...

But traditional RPGs definitely have their downsides.