My roleplaying games
Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.
I’ve been playing roleplaying games (RPGs) for more than half my life. Primarily tabletop roleplaying games, followed by online RPGs, and even snuck in a little live action roleplaying. I don’t categorize most video games which typically fall under the moniker roleplaying as roleplaying games.
For the uninitiated, roleplaying games are cooperative storytelling games. You play with them multiple people in an attempt to create some kind of story, usually by making up and then acting out some sort of character. The most popular RPG known in this day and age is Dungeons and Dragons, but there are many other games such as Vanished Lands, the World of Darkness games, Pathfinder, Exalted, Shadowrun, Eclipse Phase, CthulhuTech, and Dresden Files. Each of these games presents rules on how to play the game fairly and create certain types of stories.
I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons over the last year. Two of the latest edition (4th edition) and one of the prior edition (3.5). And while I still enjoy these games, I’ve been itching to try something new. One of the problems with roleplaying games is that it requires a significant time investment (anywhere from 8 hours a month to 3-4 hours a week) and that most standard types of RPGs require someone to play a Game Master (GM) position. The Game Master typically does a lot of the “work” necessary to help keep the game running and while it can be a fulfilling position, it requires even more of a time investment and there are less people willing to GM than to be a player, where you only have to worry about your own character, for the most part.
This means that starting up a new game can be difficult, especially if you want to play in that game, rather than GM. For the last year I have had two games I’ve been itching to play, well three. Dresden Files, Eclipse Phase, and CthulhuTech. If you’ve followed this blog before, you’ve heard me go on about Eclipse Phase I am sure. If you are interested at all in ost-apocalyptic transhuman conspiracy and horror just let me know and I can share the PDFs with you.
But a game I’d like to expound upon a little bit is the Dresden Files RPG, because I’ve had the good fortune to actually manage to get into two one shot games. To explain, one-shots are the somewhat non-standard way to play a RPG. Typically you gather together to play a campaign that has no definitive end. One-shots are games designed very specifically to have an ending point, usually when a story concludes. One shots can be awesome but their problem lies in that most RPGs can have a significant investment time in creating your character, learning the rules, and other issues, that sometimes people aren’t willing to put in that kind of effort. Like I said, RPGs are an investment.
So next time I’ll be discussing some of my initial impressions of the Dresden Files RPG. If you read this blog and have any particular questions about roleplaying games, leave a comment and I’ll try and answer them before my next post. So stay tuned! Huh. Does that even make sense anymore? I imagine a fair amount of people don’t even know the concept of tuning a TV, although it is definitely a better expression than “Don’t touch that dial!”, which hardly ever made sense as almost all the TVs I grew up with had buttons rather than dials anyway (almost all). Anyway, next time!
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