MMORGs and role playing discussion.

My favourite game/genre is Call of Cthullu - RPG in HP Lovecraft's dark 1920's. Refereeing a good game is an art, and with the right players can be extraordinarily dark and intense - though with the obligatory RPG ROFLMAO moments for light relief I've also had amazing games of Vampire (The Masquerade) and Mage - all of these have been much more exercises in role-playing than your usual hack and slash D&D. Though for the best FRPG hack & slash, you can't beat Runequest - all hail Orlanth Rex

No, but not having played anything in the past nine years or so, desperate for something Streamlining my business at the moment, so hopefully will have much more time for such things. Perhaps we should arrange an EvC gaming weekend...?

Yep, as well as that dread couplet, uttered by the mad arab, Abdul Al'Hazred in his Necronomicon:

quote:

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That is not dead which can enternal lie...

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And with strange aeons even death my die

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Which you have seen on a certain Iron Maiden album cover That's the Dungeon Master, as we'd call him/her in D&D. RPGing is about telling a living story - the referee is essentially the author, and the players the major characters. e.g.Player1: ok, I'm going down the stairwell - anyone following?
Player2: yep, though I'm keeping a good eye out behind me
Player3: not a chance - I'll stay put
Ref: you follow the tight spiral stairs down, your torch just about lighting up the walls. There's a growing stench - sickly sweet - that's starting to make you both nauseous...
Player2: not so sure about this - shall we go back up?
Player1: no, we have to find her
Ref: there's a sudden shriek from upstairs, a dull thud, and...
Player3: huh? What's going on? What's happened?
Ref: you're peering down the stairwell - you feel something move behind you - you shriek
Player3: I pull my gun and spin round...
Ref: just as a club comes down on your head. You feel no more...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Priceless - oh to be eleven again and discovering D&D for the first time (1980)

Yep, we used to "free-form" quite regularly. I was sceptical at first, but soon found that we just didn't miss the dice and character sheets. As with all good RPG, it's down to having a great ref.I used to be crap at anything more challenging than hack & slash: I'd get a story idea and then run the game on rails, as I didn't have the confidence to let the players screw everything up. Then I learnt to relax, and just enjoy roleplaying whatever stupid scenario developed, even when it was a million miles from what I had intended. That's a major difference between character advancement games, such as D&D, where players can derive enjoyment just from building experience, and story-driven games such as CoC, Traveller, and most free-form, where the story is everything...

They can be good fun. I loved all of BG, BGII, ToB. But it is still playing a computer game... There is no comparison to real RPG. I think Granny said it best a few posts up: RPG is about interaction with other people, whether it is goofing around, RPing a bunch of misfit superheroes (we drove our ref mad with this one - we refused to take it seriously much to his dismay, but after the second session he had to conceed that three hours of non-stop hysterics was not a bad way of spending an evening - my power was to "grow big" FFS - we discovered that there is literally no limit to the number of possible nob and underpants jokes) or taking ourselves very seriously, as actors, in RPG is about face-to-face social interaction before anything else, and computer games are the antithesis of this. And it's the guys that spend every spare second zoned into their PS3s and XBoxes that call the RPGers geeks Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Yep - in the mid-80s we had a year long Traveller compaign that had a great AD&D crossover segment!! Nothing like taking down dragons with an FGMP-15 (Fusion Gun - Man Portable)