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What we're playing

Amazingly, we're not playing World of Warcraft at the moment, but I'm sure we'll be back. Where WoW is concerned, it seems perpetual recovery is the best possible hope.

No, what we're playing at the moment is Wizard 101, which seems to me to be an under-appreciated gem. Perhaps it's family-friendly image and Harry Potter-esque theme has been putting people off, but then that's their loss. Beneath the simple, childish art style is a very good CCG/RPG hybrid, with all the deck-building and min-maxing potential that entails.

It's also perfect for the way we like to play MMOs -- just the two of us, playing MMOs as basically single-player games with very good multiplayer. You can instantly teleport yourself to any of your friends. Grouping is available, but you can join other people for battles or boss fights seamlessly without grouping. There are no looting options, so there's no drama. Chat is heavily filtered, and can be turned off entirely, so you don't have to endure endless waves of moronic chatter. So far we've been able to duo or solo every boss encounter. Excellent.

Offline, we've also played a bit of Microlite20, which is a cut-down version of the traditional pen-and-paper D20 rules system. With a few house rules and a bunch of index cards, we've been playing without a DM, in a roguelike style with lots of combat and emphasis on dungeon crawling. We're rollplaying, rather than roleplaying.

We're going camping in a week's time, so I'm going to be creating a short campaign for us to battle through while we're sat in a tent in the dark and poring rain.

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