| Like many teenagers with my kind of imaginary-driven mind, I was introduced to roleplaying and was quickly hooked. I'd heard about Dungeons and Dragons, but for me, the game that truly clicked was Warhammer. Nowadays, the name Warhammer merely evokes the concept of tabletop wargames, but back in the 1990s, Warhammer also had a roleplaying system. | | I was introduced to it by my fellow Diplodocus co-creator Jonathan Jacques, and I kept playing for a very long time with my highschool friends, giving birth to characters such has Ludovicus, Rolf, Wolmar and Jacob, whose names still have the ring of legend today. Among us they do, anyways. During all that time, I was always the GM. | | After 2001, as I got more and more involved with online communities, I moved to a new kind of roleplaying: online games using blogging sites. It took a long time to wrap my mind around the concept of what is essentially roleplaying without a GM. The players themselves use their own creative judgment to make things happen. |
| _________________________________________________________________ |
| There usually exists a moderator, to manage the community and introduce major plotpoints, but other than that, it's entirely player-driven. This results in games with a much stronger emphasis on character development and interaction, and less on action and stats-management. The classic "Munchkin" type of roleplayer finds no niche there. | | When I started going to cons, I quickly became aware of what is essentially the most perfect amalgam of these two types of roleplaying. LARP, or Live-Action RolePlaying. I was reluctant to try for many years, afraid it would sap away precious con time, until I finally did try and I realized that I wanted nothing less than devote my entire con time to it! | | Just like online roleplaying, the emphasis is on character personification and acting, encouraging interaction with other characters, but players also do carry a stat sheet just like in tabletop roleplaying, with an element of chance (for which rock-paper-scissor is used in lieu of dice) thrown in to test characters against certain trials. |
| _________________________________________________________________ |
| The ultimate roleplaying experience for me would be part of a professional improv troupe, or to be cast in a play. To that effect, I put together skits for masquerade events at conventions as often as I can. I'm also always happy to be a self-proclaimed master of ceremonies to organize improvisational games (in the vein of Whose Line Is it Anyways?) when I'm among friends. | | Roleplay tends to -but is not obligated to- delve into a territory known as 'slash'. Slash entails the discussion among fans of character pairings issued either from the original material that created them (canon) or not (fanon). Sometimes the line between the two can be blurry. Most importantly, slash often takes liberties with the sexual orientations of the original characters. I am a massive fan of this sort of slash, and can thoroughly enjoy such hypothetical discussions for hours on end. |