The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide Review: Roll the Dice, Take a Chance

We all have our roles to play; but are we playing them right? Have you balanced your stats, repaired your amour, counted your gold If you haven’t, The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide by James D’amato, will help you get your inventory in check. This guide takes you down a bright path to victory using interactive writing and well-educated role-playing language that keeps the reader making those dexterity saves. 

 To properly understand and break down the levels of the intricacies of this book we must start at the books very structures. The guide is broken up into three parts-save the introduction and reader insert sections- each with the respective labels, Basic Storytelling, Advanced Player Techniques, and Playing from Experience. Each section gives an in-depth look at some otherwise basic concepts, showing that the game doesn’t just stop at your stats or character sheet, what you thought was basic has much more layers than most could imagine. 

The guide touches on what every RPG player has heard once in their gaming career, maybe from a friend you have played with or even from the game’s tutorial but what sets this guide apart from the tutorial is how properly interactive the guide is by engaging the reader and asking them what they want from their games, what do they want from their plays and how can they reflect on what they have done or will do and how to bring it to the Experience Cap.

The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide uses terms that at times can catch some of the most seasoned RPG veterans off guard such as “Schrödinger’s Goblin” yet still goes over classics that are necessary for a player’s proper understanding of world-building and storytelling such as The Lord of The Rings and Hamlet. James D’amato exhibits not only his extensive knowledge of RPG’s but also his knowledge of the culture surrounding the communities of RPG’s and how games once seen as abasement activity has now made their way into mainstream media and only continue to grow. 

The guide puts much emphasis on the importance of taking anything you write seriously but taking a world you create much more seriously, creating none play characters (NPC’s) that are not a direct member of the party but still have an important overall impact on the story you have written, creating lives for these characters to let the players know an NPC is much more than a faceless drone who has a set amount of information to vomit at them before disappearing into an alley-way. The guide brings the importance of creating a world that feels lived into the front view of the reader. Shops that felt shopped in, homes that feel lived in, Lands and worlds that feel as if there is history in the ground that your players stand on. 

After getting to the end of this guide it’s easy to say I can add a +2 to my intelligence score, The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide is a love letter to the fans of all RPG from Dungeons and Dragons to Final Fantasy.