I've been called a Gamer, but I don't feel like that's accurate. I game like its a problem: old school, new school, disk, cartridge, computer. Console doesn't matter. Genre doesn't matter. Graphics and writing are all but meaningless. Give me a story that doesn't make me want to kill myself and a means to interact with it and I'm a pig in shit.
That said, video games are a dirty backstreet whore compared to my real love. Tabletop. D&D, Vampire, Shadowrun; Its dangerous. I've lost more hours to tabletop games than I have to the crushing sadness in my soul. To me rolling dice is kitty-corner to orgasm. It's the perfect vice. Absolute customization coupled with a near infinite variety of genres, settings, abilities, story possibilities. Almost absolute control of the escape experience. Add in a couple other folks of similar disposition and the world opens up in ways its hard to describe without resorting to cliche` or innuendo.
And that's just playing in a good game.
Building a world from a base system or, hell, from scratch, is very much like being a god. Developing a history and peopling a whole cosmos, having absolute control over the creation and evolution of a world and then giving it all up as the players come into it. Letting them interact with the personalities you've forged and watching your world change from their touch. Its intoxicating.
Now, I know it can be hard to come out of one's shell in a role-play environment. Pretending to be someone else, especially in a wholly fictional context tends to either make you feel like an asshole or an idiot the first few times out. But it gets better, and its totally worth it. Everyone escapes somehow, for me the best part of the escape is getting others out with me and doing something grand. Maybe not good or noble, but Grand. So what the hell. Get out there, roll some dice. Be a ninja or a vampire or the chosen thrall of some Elder Thing. What do any of us ever really stand to lose?
-Eshi
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