My first session of Project ORCS was one of the longest and most overwhelming demos of the decade and change that I've been writing about games. It's an upcoming "collaborative storytelling RPG" or "CSRPG" in the works at Lightforge Games, a studio of many ex-Blizzard and Epic Games devs. That includes former Blizzard lead engineer and Epic UI director Matt Schembari, now CEO at his own studio. Schembari also served as the D&D DM-like "Guide" for my session, which I shared with two other people I'd never met before.
Over the course of two hours, I was intimidated, confused, and then ultimately excited by the world's first CSRPG. Project ORCS – that's a codename short for Online Roleplaying with Collaborative Storytelling – is billed as "an on-ramp to roleplaying," and apart from being an RPG, it is also a bunch of stuff I usually avoid. It's inspired by the tabletop games I've never played, the MMOs I can never stick with, and the social or party games that I can only enjoy sparingly with a small group of close friends. I'm not creative, creatively motivated, outspokenly social, or terribly collaborative. I am arguably the worst type of person for this game, but I'd argue that I'm also a good acid test for how approachable it is. And it is testament to the core idea that I still had fun with it and can now seriously imagine playing it with my friend group.
