So who likes pen-and-paper RPGs?

[Perihelion]

Those of you who talk to me much probably know that this is one of my main hobbies. Running a PnP game is a hell of a lot less work than making an actual video game, and it's a lot more dynamic, and you can do it with all of your friends! Nerdy stigma or no, it's a blast, and I recommend those of you who haven't tried it before give it a shot. I've played D&D 3.5, D20 Modern, New World of Darkness, GURPS 4, Feng Shui, etc. I want to try Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun but haven't had the opportunity so far.

Have you played any? What system(s)? How was your experience? Any stories? Any awesome/horrible GMs? Alternatively, have you not had the chance but want to?

The group I play with is incredibly dysfunctional. I think the only game where we actually worked well together was the one where we were all evil and trying to take over Calimshan with an army of hobgoblins. As an example, in the first game I ran, the chaotic neutral druid first became convinced that there was a man living in the wall and became obsessed with finding him, which led to one scene in particular where a disgusting fat guy from an inn successfully convinced her that the man in the wall was in his pants and would she please come up to his room so he could show her. Then, when they had to track someone down and ask him a few questions, she decided that the best way to restrain him was to SUMMON A BEAR TO MAUL HIM, and they demolished the back wall of the inn to escape from the guards. Luckily I had another lead planned in case they fucked that one up, so she followed another guy into another inn, then decided that instead of going in and, you know, talking to the guy, she'd blind everyone in the inn and then light it on fire. There was also a paladin who was increasingly self-delusional as he struggled harder and harder to justify not murdering this druid and a dread necromancer who stowed the corpses of everyone the druid killed in his bag of holding for later reanimation. So when they were later arrested, they were carrying all the evidence with them! It was funnier in context than as I'm relating it here, because up until lighting the inn on fire, she really was causing chaos through incompetence rather than deliberately trying to derail the game.

So uh, what about you?

 

[bacon]

ive never actually played any "paper" rpgs but its always seemed somewhat interesting. Ive always enjoyed the ability to free create something instead of being restrained. I just dont have anyone to play with. :c

Also you are supposed to be dead who are you?

 

[Daxis]

I never really got into the spirit of western rpgs and pen/paper rpgs, although admittedly I've never tried it, and half the people around me think rocket launchers when I talk about rpgs.

I find it a bit weird in the sense that someone is chaotic/neutral/good/lawful and all that stuff. I also find that a lot of it falls into the sense that evil= ugly, and that all monsters are ugly and hideous looking. (I'm thinking D&D and Warcraft as I write this).

I do however would really like to try one. I'm always one to try out a game first, and rpgs are really my thing. Additionally, I have various ideas about what pen/paper rpgs are about after reading all of something positive.

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

I don't have enough nerdy friends to try a Pen and Paper RPG, sadly, so I never played one before. ^_^; (It's even worse now that moved away from all of them.)

I will say I would definitely give it shot since it sounds kind of fun! XD The only problem I foresee is that I could become nervous for having no imagination to think of what to do next when it's my turn, or that my character is might be too lame. O.oa

 

[Perihelion]

@ Bacon: I'm not dead, just...slightly sporadic! Dx

@ Daxis: Alignment is a D&D thing. I find its mechanical effects awkward and tend to just use it as a loose roleplaying guide and interpret it creatively to make it less black and white. Other systems use different morality systems. nWoD has you roll for degeneration if you perform an act below your current morality level (e.g. murder), and if you fail, you risk getting a derangement like paranoia or depression. But that's also awkward. I prefer systems like GURPS that don't use that sort of thing at all, as that's an RP thing that just becomes awkward when you shove mechanics on it.

@ Strawberry: Yeah, it's a lot of fun! I play online because finding people to play with IRL is awkward.

 

[DerVVulfman]

I still have my 1st Editions, guys. As well as 2nd Edition D&D books and some 3rds. Didn't toss a single Monster Manual away.

Did I play? Yeah, but I was more suited to actually running the campaigns and had to be sharp with the 'characters' I was playing with. By characters, I mean the actual goofballs playing the game :biggrin:

Scared the hell outta the lot when I ran the classic vampire game, Ravenloft. So much so, I made the mage go paranoid and he fried half of his party with a fireball spell. Do it right, and you can really set the mood (or scare the hell outta them). :haha:

 

[Venetia]

I played live tabletop D&D for a while. My bf and his brother go to a card shop down the street, and play D&D on Tuesdays and Sundays. I accompanied them for a while.

There were 4 chicks other than me and about 30-40 guys that would show up for the sessions. (The groups'd be about 7-8 people each, and some of them were there for 40k or Magic) The other girls consisted of:
- One girl with massive dental problems, a severe case of aspergers, anger issues, weight issues.
- One girl with severe burn scarring on her face and left side of body (not two-face bad but noticeable), who looked like she never ate in her life, and also had strong anger issues
- One woman, mother of (either 2 or 3), rather overweight, but not terrible looking. She was kind of cool but would only play the high-level tables.
- One woman in her late 50's or early 60's, who actually used to be in the military and went to war o.O. She was really cool but, you know, old. You couldn't do raunchy stuff or curse in her company.

And then there was me, mid-twenties, with no obvious personal, emotional, or physical problems. It got awkward sometimes! There was a lot of staring. I'm not even being narcissistic ... but especially when the bf & I were separate b/c of bathroom breaks or w/e, i could feel their wormy stares wiggling into my shirt D:

Other than that though it was ok. We set up boards and got little figurines that looked like our charas. I mostly played a Revenant Minotaur Assassin so people'd get a kick out of calling me a dead cow, or that the mobs would detect my rotten stench (ironic as most of the guys there had never learned what deodorant was).

There were some really cool guys there, mostly the older guys and store owners, and it was nice to get them as DMs or party members; they'd always make things more interesting. What sucked were the nights we'd come late and get grouped with the guys no one liked :/ (think: lack of bathing, lots of tantrums, bad decisions, corny/horrible anecdotes, eyes fixated nonstop on my chest).

I quit mostly because of how they played the game ... They required that an entire campaign be played start to finish. Most D&D campaigns were about 4-6 hours long. On work nights I'd be there until after midnight, and on Sundays I basically couldn't make plans for anything else. If it were a couple of hours it'd be cool, but spending 6 hours next to a guy with SEVERE eczema and halitosis who ogles me and tries to figure out ways to screw over my bf's character in-game is a little much!

Admittedly though ... It was nice to be in the "popular" clique for once :P

 

[moxie]

I used to have a group to play RPGs with (mainly those old Whitewolf games like Mage and Wraith? and stuff with the occasional game of D&D) but I haven't played in forever because I can't seem to make any new nerdfriends that aren't kinda creepy. Going into the local gaming store makes you feel like a slab of meat in a butcher shop. :I

 

[Ellie]

I keep saying I'll get into them but I never do.

 

[mawk]

oh man, D&D. I used to play sort of a watered-down version of 3.5e (no rations, no spell components, etc) with some friends and family back when I was like 12 or 13. we sort of got bored of it after a while, being impatient kids, but it was pretty fun while it lasted. I spent a lot of time going over the sourcebooks and stuff, just seeing what sort of things were possible and how the system worked. I've been thinking of getting back into it (there's a weekly game at this store somewhere) but that'll have to wait until I have some time, I guess.

 

[Perihelion]

Yeah, I probably wouldn't want to go to a local gaming store to find people to play with. I'd feel pretty weird going alone, especially as a girl. The thing about tabletop games is that they're only as cool as the people you play them with, and I have an awesome group online with a few really good DMs, so I don't feel the need to scrounge around irl. Granted, playing online isn't the same as playing in person, but there are perks in addition to the downsides.

I'm almost tempted to run a play-by-post or IRC thing here for you guys who've never played before, but I have my hands full at the moment and am presently more interested in systems that aren't D&D anyway. Like GURPS. They don't call it the Generic Universal Role-Playing System for nothing; you can design anything from dinosaurs to spaceships to plants to planets as player characters. It's kind of math-heavy (but only as math-heavy as you want it to be) but really flexible and neat. And I like math anyway.

Anyone played Shadowrun? I was looking through the book last night and can't decide if it's weird or interesting, although I think I'm coming down on the side of weird. It blends Gibson-esque cyberpunk with traditional fantasy tropes. The idea of simultaneous magic and technology is interesting, but idk, I feel like it's smushed two unrelated genres together without innovating on them at all and didn't adapt them very well.

 

[bluehazed]

I play a couple of D&D campaigns down in my town, we play 2nd edition. I'm setting up a second campaign, I have 1.1GB of 2nd edition planescape campaign setting books :D
We're pretty regular, although the first campaign is down for a bit because one member is in toronto right now, and the other in malaysia.

I have a die baggie and lots of dice

 

[Perihelion]

Planescape is by far my favorite D&D campaign setting, but the 2nd ed. rules are a nightmare. I still have no idea how to compute THAC0.

 

[bluehazed]

We used 2nd edition because we were used to the system :P THAC0 made sense to us >_< Perhaps we are insane

Among other things

 

[Pokémaniac]

I've never played, but I really want to! Where can I find these online people? Is there anywhere for newbies?

If it counts, back one or two(?) years ago there was a group of about 5-6 people(including me) that played a kind of free form version without the numbers/rules on my bus(we live an hour and a half away from school ;_. The DM pretty much decided how everything went. It worked pretty well, but because I was in year 7 and the rest were older, whoever was the DM would always decide against me and stuff which kinda ruined it for me(plus the "campaigns" were made as we went so there was a lot of going around in circles, getting nowhere and not a lot happening). Eventually they got bored of playing and it stopped.

 

[Spoo]

I live in rural Alabama, so if I so much as mention anything nerdy around here it means a good month or two of shunning. Even though I've never had anyone to play with, though, I have found it sort of fascinating with all the complicating rules, spells, character building, etc. Looking at D&D character sheets actually inspired the process I use to create the more technical aspects of my characters.

So no, never tabletop RPGs, but like most preteens I was into TCGs (I.E Yu-Gay-Ho) while they were in. Heck, I'd still play Magic if anyone would play me.

 

[DerVVulfman]

It's been a couple years since it was suggested in a chatroom I was in, but some friends found a Java-based chatroom that catered to online tabletop gaming. It came complete with dice systems and a few other niceties. Granted, it's not the same as having an actual tabletop to see everything going on.

 

[Ellie]

Slacked has some dicebots (well, bots which have dice functions). I know a few people who've coded their own too.

 

[kyonides]

I never could play such an RPG, very few people play such things in my country and many are seen as demonic as if it were some kind of dark cult.

 

[Sgt. Cookie]

I found this thing called "OpenRPG". Its basically a virtual tabletop. I am downloading it now. Seems...interesting. I'll give a report sometime tomorrow.