Day 17: "I cast Magic Missile at the darkness!"

[mousme]

sorceror has asked me to talk about roleplaying games!

It doesn't feel like that long, but I realised recently that I've been roleplaying for going on fifteen years now. I discovered roleplaying in university, pretty much by accident, and it changed my life.

It was January of 1999, and I was wandering by the tables at Activities' Night, when a Nerf dart came sailing seemingly out of nowhere and bonked me in the head. Startled, I looked around and saw the biggest black guy I'd ever seen and a petite redhead both grinning at me from ear to ear. Naturally I went over to investigate, and that's how I met blackbuffet and Joane. They both made a valiant attempt to explain roleplaying to me, but I have discovered that gaming is basically incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't done it themselves. They invited me to come hang out at the McGill Gamers' Guild the next day, and since I was volunteering at the Women's Union at the time which was right next door, it wasn't difficult at all to stop by and meet people.

I hung out there for an afternoon and listened to all the gaming stories, most of which went right over my head. I decided that these people were really nice and all, but that it was all incomprehensible gibberish and that it probably wasn't for me. This is due to the fact that most gamers talk about their characters in the first person (as I have learned to do) and talk about their characters' adventures in a way that suggests it actually happened, which, let me tell you, was incredibly confusing for me. "What do you mean, you all ran out into the streets of Montreal by Night and started a war with another vampire clan? Didn't you get arrested?" :P

So I crept away and intended never to go back, right up until I sat next to curtana in a Chaucer class, and we started talking. At the time she was the president of the Guild, and she encouraged me to come back and hang out some more, and that's when I met my first ever GM, who ran a pretty classic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game. I played a cleric, and the campaign lasted for close to two years.

After that, I was thoroughly hooked. I helped to run the Guild the following year, and the year after that I became President myself. While I was always pretty busy with my studies, I also always had at least two roleplaying campaigns on the go, sometimes more.

My main love was Deadlands: The Weird West, which was basically a mashup of horror, steampunk and Western. Sergio Leone Meets Romero on a Speeding Locomotive. What's not to love, am I right? I was appointed the chronicler of our little group, and at the end of that two year campaign (we gamed once a week for marathon sessions of sometimes more than twelve hours at a time), I had over 500 pages of game notes written up in narrative form. Years later I started to convert that campaign into serial form, which some of you might have read over at my now-unused writing journal secret_history, titled Beyond the Pale. BTP currently stands at about 200,000 words if memory serves, and I hadn't even covered the first year of the game. There is so much fodder for stories in that campaign, and while I keep meaning to get back to it, there is a lot of the previous story that needs fixing, and I haven't had the heart to go back and do that. :P

My roleplaying habit took a really big hit when I started shift work. It's really hard to make my schedule coordinate with anyone else's, since regular weekly appointments are basically impossible for me without taking time off work. Given that we are constantly short-staffed, taking time off work regularly is a no-go. Taking vacations every so often is fine, but I can't just inform my boss that I need every Friday night off. It's just not done. ;)

I wasn't kidding when I said roleplaying changed my life. Literally all of the friends I have today I met either roleplaying directly, or indirectly through other friends who roleplayed. I owe my entire social life to roleplaying. While the stereotype of gamers portrays them as unwashed white male nerds with no social skills living in their mothers' basements, that stereotype has never applied to the people I know. The gamers I know are fairly evenly divided into men and women (and a few genderfluid or genderqueer types), and most if not all of them are educated and extremely well socialised. If nothing else, roleplaying a wide range of characters and pretend-interacting with a wide range of other personalities kind of forces you to hone your interpersonal skills.

In short, yay roleplaying! One day, at some point, I may be able to join a regular game again. In the meantime, I try to join people's one-off games, and keep in touch with my friends mostly through social media.

Comments

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that roleplaying games are also a source of many inside jokes...

("I yam a good Mama! Now, Seryozha, bleed into this cup.")