Tag Archives: Roleplaying Games

Time to admit it

It’s time to admit it: I’m done with roleplaying games. I didn’t mean for it to end this way, but the hour has come and up to this point I was just fooling myself that there was still some mileage left for me in the hobby. Such is not the case.

I got to thinking about this as I skimmed over the topics at Story Games and the RPGnet forums today. I haven’t posted to either of them in the better part of a year, not even to offer a minor comment, and I find that I don’t really miss participating there. I’m completely disconnected from the hobby, from the people who engage in the hobby, everything.

Just to see where I stood vis-à-vis roleplaying, I clicked on the appropriate tag over there in the sidebar. I discovered that over the last two years I have posted a grand total of six entries concerning the topic. Six. I’ve posted more about ninja in that time, and that’s an even more niche subject.

Earlier this year I took a swing at roleplaying once more, but I couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was the games themselves or maybe it was the con environment, but I didn’t enjoy myself. And thinking back, I realize that the last time I had a regular game (approximately 1999), I didn’t have much fun then, either.

I have terrific memories of playing games through my teens and into my early twenties, but I’m not that guy anymore. It’s been twenty years since my roleplaying heyday. I credit roleplaying with making me the storyteller I am today, so it definitely wasn’t a waste of time or effort on my part, but at some point I turned away from collaborative creation and looked inward. The end result has been my emergent novel-writing career. That hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, particularly during the four-year gap between recommitting to writing and actually making a novel sale, but things are developing well and I’m pleased.

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Ask a ninja

I don’t talk about roleplaying games very much in this space because, frankly, I don’t play them that often anymore. I tried getting back into the scene in January, starting out with a trip to a semi-local gaming convention, but that never panned out into anything. And what’s more, I’ve been so thoroughly alienated by the discussion forum where I used to do my gaming talk that I find I don’t have the taste for the hobby anymore, or at least not with those kinds of people.

I guess it was close to six months ago now that some guy started a thread complaining that a recent game-design contest was “racist” because it had included, as part as a number of one-word creative prompts, the word coyote. The coyote prompt caused several designers to make games based on Native American concepts, and apparently the very idea of someone other than a Native American making a game with Native American themes was so offensive that the forum had to have a fiery confrontation for weeks on the subject of “cultural appropriation.”

Now I don’t usually use profanity on this blog because I never know who might be reading, but to be perfectly frank, the concept that only people of a certain ethnicity/color/religion can create concerning that ethnicity/color/religion is a bunch of bullshit. It’s been disproven time and again in literature and film and I also imagine it would come as quite a surprise to anthropologists, who spend their entire lives learning the nuances of cultures, that truly knowing someone else’s point of view is impossible. And what does “truly knowing” even mean?

When I played roleplaying games in the 1980s (they were big then), we played all sorts of characters in all sorts of settings. We played women and men, blacks and whites and Asians. We played in historical settings and contemporary settings. We did all of this and at no time did we ever belittle or denigrate the different places and people with which we chose to create. This is as it should be. Just about the only groups that didn’t get fair treatment were Russians and/or communists because, hey, it was the ’80s.

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Mission (sort of) accomplished!

So I blogged last week about roleplaying and how I’d grown disconnected from it over the years. I mentioned at that time that I had registered for Dreamation, a New York City-area convention devoted entirely to gaming of all varieties, from indie RPGs to hardcore war games. It came highly recommended, so I was cautiously optimistic.

You will be happy to know that I did make it up there and I did roleplay for the first time (essentially) in over ten years. I was signed up for seven games and played four of them. Why only four? Because my wife, and then my son, took ill and I couldn’t justify keeping them cooped up sick in a hotel room while I gamed. We came home Saturday morning.

I regret not playing those last three games, but it was pretty much out of my hands. But at least I did play, which was the whole point of the exercise.

First off was Monsterhearts, a game of teenaged monsters and their emotional travails. I was super-nervous going into this one, not least because it was my return to gaming, but also because I haven’t been a teenager in a long, long time. This game, like all the others I played, was totally new to me, too. I had to learn the rules at the table, along with everyone else.

It went fairly well, I think. My character was a kind of creepy, introverted ghost-teen just looking for some human contact, and though the lion’s share of the “action” — this is not an action game like, say, Dungeons & Dragons — went to another couple of players, I was happy just to do my thing and let them have the spotlight. Everyone seemed to come away pleased.

The next morning I played a game called Remember Tomorrow. Of all the games I was set to play, this was the one that I was most concerned about because it involved no GM and was almost entirely improvised. Could I do it? The answer is: yes, I could. People seemed to like my character and the story tools I brought to the table, and though we spent half our allotted four hours just setting up, we got a good two hours of gaming in. All was well. The GM recommended an empanada restaurant to us for lunch which, while offering tasty treats, may have contributed to the illness later on.

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Roll for initiative!

It’s been over a year since I last blogged about any topic involving tabletop roleplaying games and you will probably be unsurprised to learn that I have done no gaming in that time.

With the exception of a couple abortive sessions of Wushu and GHOST/ECHO, I have not played in a roleplaying game since around 2001. That’s a long, long time. My experience with the various d20 System games I was playing at the time — Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars — was not great and I left the roleplaying world with a heavy heart. Before that I had last gamed in 1993, so you can see that the gaps between games have grown longer and longer.

I really like roleplaying, though, and while I’m no longer in my 20s and full of youthful vigor, I am attracted to the experience of telling stories collectively with other people. I am especially interested in the new breed of games, so-called “story games,” which place far less emphasis on grid-based tactical combat popularized by D&D and much more on character and plot. You may have guessed from my chosen profession that I’m a story guy, so the reasons this would appeal to me should be pretty obvious.

So though I have not been playing, I have not stopped acquiring and reading rulebooks and joining discussions in places like Story Games — the site, not the style of game — and generally keeping my toe in the pool. Until now.

After a couple of years away from the Story Games forum, I got back into the talky-talk and I explained to the other users there my situation: I’m an older guy, very much of the old school of gaming, who’s been in exile from the gaming scene for more than 10 years. Is there any chance for me to ever play again? Their answer: yes. Under the right circumstances, anyway.

I actually have a couple of well-respected Story Gamers in my area, but unfortunately both of them own multiple cats. I have terrible allergic reactions to one cat. Add a second (or a third) and I could seriously end up in a hospital. I want to play games, but not that badly. And unfortunately because of our respective schedules, meeting up at the only game store local to all of us is essentially impossible.

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