Role-Playing
Sep. 9th, 2006 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuMy wife, the lovely and talented ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snippy had some friends over this afternoon. Among them were serenejournal, kightp and others. I hung out with them for a while before taking off to attend another party given by a coworker. At one point during the afternoon the topic of roleplaying came up.
kightp was relatively recently introduced to roleplaying and discovered that she liked it. serenejournal said that she doesn't enjoy playing but enjoys being the Snack Wench when the "geeks" gather for their weekly game. Snack Wenchery reportedly involves wearing revealing clothing, providing snacks, and sitting on the laps of the gamers.
My lovely and talented wife immediately announced that if she didn't enjoy gaming itself so much, she'd definitely enjoy being the Snack Wench. She thought I'd enjoy having a Snack Wench around as well. Which I would...if I were actually doing much gaming in meatspace. Alas, that isn't the case. We--meaning snippy and I--haven't done any real gaming in a very long while. Our gaming group finally dissolved a year or so ago, and at that we hadn't done any real roleplaying for a long time before that.
I joined a local Champions game some months back, but that group only gets together once a month at best--and not always then. The vagaries of work and family frequently make it difficult for all of us to get together. And, to tell the truth, sometimes I just don't feel all that excited about playing. It's not the group--the guys are fun to hang around with, I just...
I don't know what I just. Maybe it's just that I'm getting my gaming fix online. I'm theoretically playing in two online Champions games and one freeform LJ game. One is still ongoing and has been for over a year now. It's a one-on-one game by email between myself and the GM. While it's based on Champions (the characters are designed using the rules and the GM adjudicates combat with the rules), from my end it's mostly just a collaborative story. That would be the game in which I'm playing Hell's Angel, a superheroine strongly modeled on my wife.
The other Champions game is moribund. Nothing is going on, and I strongly suspect it will fold completely in the not too distant future. That would be, like, nearly the tenth online game I've joined that folded either before it actually got going or very shortly afterward. I'm sure there are successful online Champions games, but I've yet to play in more than one.
I'm pretty sure that the Hell's Angel game has worked because it's one on one. The GM is actually running four such games, all set in the same game city, but the players are each playing solo. The PCs all know one another and are members of the same organization, but they don't interact except peripherally. Which means that lack of activity--or different levels of activity--or the loss of a player doesn't throw the whole game out of whack.
But even that game pales in comparison to Crossing_Lostrp. That game began in December of 2005 and is still going strong. It's a freeform game. It really is essentially a collaborative writing exercise; the players choose characters (mostly characters from fiction, though one or two are original characters) and then throw themselves into the game. It's been a blast. Quite a few players have come and gone, though a core of six or eight of us have been there from the beginning. No character sheets, no rules system, just cooperative storytelling.
That may be why I've been enjoying it so much. It's the interactivity of gaming, but it also allows me to enjoy writing. I don't have to worry about rules or damage dice or any of that stuff. If I have a nifty idea for an interaction with anothe player character, I can set it up with the player OOC and then we play it out in a thread. If I want to throw a monkeywrench into the works, I email the GM outlining my evil plan, get the go-ahead and then horrify everyone with something awful. (I take pride in the fact that I often get comments about how eeeeevil the NPCs I write can be.)
I miss face to face gaming. And yet...online gaming is in many ways much easier. Players can post whenever they're available. No need to mesh schedules or arrange a meeting place. And freeform gaming of the sort in Crossing_Lostrp is so much simpler than even "rules light" systems like Fudge. As long as you okay any major plot ideas with the GM and cooperate with other players regarding what happens to their characters, you can do anything you want. No skill rolls, no dice rolling, just do your best to write entertaining, amusing, funny, dramatic or horrifying scenes.
snippy had some friends over this afternoon. Among them were serenejournal, kightp and others. I hung out with them for a while before taking off to attend another party given by a coworker. At one point during the afternoon the topic of roleplaying came up. kightp was relatively recently introduced to roleplaying and discovered that she liked it. serenejournal said that she doesn't enjoy playing but enjoys being the Snack Wench when the "geeks" gather for their weekly game. Snack Wenchery reportedly involves wearing revealing clothing, providing snacks, and sitting on the laps of the gamers.My lovely and talented wife immediately announced that if she didn't enjoy gaming itself so much, she'd definitely enjoy being the Snack Wench. She thought I'd enjoy having a Snack Wench around as well. Which I would...if I were actually doing much gaming in meatspace. Alas, that isn't the case. We--meaning snippy and I--haven't done any real gaming in a very long while. Our gaming group finally dissolved a year or so ago, and at that we hadn't done any real roleplaying for a long time before that.
I joined a local Champions game some months back, but that group only gets together once a month at best--and not always then. The vagaries of work and family frequently make it difficult for all of us to get together. And, to tell the truth, sometimes I just don't feel all that excited about playing. It's not the group--the guys are fun to hang around with, I just...
I don't know what I just. Maybe it's just that I'm getting my gaming fix online. I'm theoretically playing in two online Champions games and one freeform LJ game. One is still ongoing and has been for over a year now. It's a one-on-one game by email between myself and the GM. While it's based on Champions (the characters are designed using the rules and the GM adjudicates combat with the rules), from my end it's mostly just a collaborative story. That would be the game in which I'm playing Hell's Angel, a superheroine strongly modeled on my wife.
The other Champions game is moribund. Nothing is going on, and I strongly suspect it will fold completely in the not too distant future. That would be, like, nearly the tenth online game I've joined that folded either before it actually got going or very shortly afterward. I'm sure there are successful online Champions games, but I've yet to play in more than one.
I'm pretty sure that the Hell's Angel game has worked because it's one on one. The GM is actually running four such games, all set in the same game city, but the players are each playing solo. The PCs all know one another and are members of the same organization, but they don't interact except peripherally. Which means that lack of activity--or different levels of activity--or the loss of a player doesn't throw the whole game out of whack.
But even that game pales in comparison to Crossing_Lostrp. That game began in December of 2005 and is still going strong. It's a freeform game. It really is essentially a collaborative writing exercise; the players choose characters (mostly characters from fiction, though one or two are original characters) and then throw themselves into the game. It's been a blast. Quite a few players have come and gone, though a core of six or eight of us have been there from the beginning. No character sheets, no rules system, just cooperative storytelling.
That may be why I've been enjoying it so much. It's the interactivity of gaming, but it also allows me to enjoy writing. I don't have to worry about rules or damage dice or any of that stuff. If I have a nifty idea for an interaction with anothe player character, I can set it up with the player OOC and then we play it out in a thread. If I want to throw a monkeywrench into the works, I email the GM outlining my evil plan, get the go-ahead and then horrify everyone with something awful. (I take pride in the fact that I often get comments about how eeeeevil the NPCs I write can be.)
I miss face to face gaming. And yet...online gaming is in many ways much easier. Players can post whenever they're available. No need to mesh schedules or arrange a meeting place. And freeform gaming of the sort in Crossing_Lostrp is so much simpler than even "rules light" systems like Fudge. As long as you okay any major plot ideas with the GM and cooperate with other players regarding what happens to their characters, you can do anything you want. No skill rolls, no dice rolling, just do your best to write entertaining, amusing, funny, dramatic or horrifying scenes.
