Mind Altered Roleplay

If you've ever seen a month's-worth of blog hits, you'll understand my next statement.

For all of you who actually Googled for "mind altered roleplay" or maybe just "mind altered" or possibly just "roleplay" I am sorry but this is probably not the site you're looking for. I have yet to include any kind of drug-addled shenanigans to my bedroom life. Nor have I ever purchased/worn burlap underwear. I apologize also to all those who came here looking for "proper suicide emo" and "scenes with mice digging holes." For the life of me I don't get it, but I will endeavor to include these topics in my subsequent musings.

Ugh, I've been stuck on that last paragraph for hours now. You'll understand when I say I've eaten a very big sandwich all on my lonesome. And now I have a weird craving for The Money Pit. But I must endure for there will be a torrent of pictures and videos ahead that are sure to boggle the socks and blow the mind off all of you, my dear minions friends.

Each Friday or Saturday night, like most of you I'm sure, my bored housewife existence turns to game night. We hook up with our neighbours (the better half of which I have known for some 10 years) and indulge in a requiem of depravity. Jk. The title might hint to that but, no. As many of us new-age geeks (uh, can I coin that one, I rather fancy it) we play boardgames or roleplay (the pen and paper version, geez). As do most of you. Surely.

What confounds me is why we would ever consider in venturing on with these subjects after opening the second bottle of wine or on our way through our second sandwich. Let me explain.

Setting (in cWoD's V:TM): after millennia of seamless integration in human society, man has seen one too many Twilight movies and is beginning to catch on. Hmm, that Madonna sure isn't getting any older. And didn't I just read in the paper that Nicholas Cage is actually part of the hosts of the undead?

Insert a scrawny Polish vampire whose biggest dream is to quit all this Vampire nonsense all together, a scrawny little girl who's pretty unsure if being undead is what's happening right now and a scrawny rich opera singer who's pretty sure being a Vampire is what's happening and she's quite enjoying it.

Obviously, as I am known to row against any plot, I immediately set myself out as defiant and constructed my penitent Vampire Alex. Because Vampires with common names is all the rage nowadays. Look at Vampire Bill or Vampire Eric. None of those french Anne-Rice-ish names. No. I have a vampire called Alex and by God he will find a cure this this nefarious ailment! Verily, thus and so!

I started out as noble as could be but I got turned around somewhere and ended up performing blood transfusion between two ghoulified cows in a barn and smearing vampire remains on a deserted road in backwater Russia with a stake. I proceeded to then swallow the most critical peace of information we had, have a cat-fight with a human three times stronger than me during daytime and spent a good twenty minutes riding up and down in an elevator for no good reason in a luxury apartment building in NYC. These were the things I did voluntarily, using whatever wits I yet had.

Unconsciously, however, our collective minds drifted in very similar if bizarre directions when analyzing what props we had encountered.

Here is what remained after my attempt at salvaging three important parts of an important document. The first I swallowed, as alluded earlier, the second I triggered burnt but the third one isn't my fault. 

After little under an hour (or maybe it was three) I managed to put the middle one back together. Now, it seems like a perfectly reasonable piece of roleplaying prop, doesn't it? Now let's check the back reversed against the light.

A bit weird yes, but... wait. Wait, what's that there with the burnt patches and... and the outline, is that...

is that... Mr. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?

Oh my God, now I can't unsee it! And is that... is that a giant missile on his head?

No, now I'm just over-thinking it. But, although...

There's a little duck flying up there! I can see it, it's like a Warner Bros. type thing!

Needless to say that was the end of our adventures for the night. We probably retreated back to RockBand as we are known to do. If only the walls were thicker we'd have more fun with it. But, like many console accessories, RockBand's weren't thought for small apartments. They should though, I mean at least the 360 is clearly marketed for frat boys.

Sometimes we play Scrabble. But that never ends well for me.

And "glee" was not a valid word.

I tell you: That Money Pit sure is a funny movie. Best Spielberg movie, hands down. What else can I be but what I am... Carpenter? Plumber? No bells?

Philistines...

Playing God, For a Change

I've spent the weekend completely preoccupied with coming up with a structured plot. From my perspective, being an ST (you can call it Storyteller, Game Master or Dungeon Master even; it all amounts to the same) is much like being a gamedev. Only, instead of having to code and build a somewhat static environment you're free to to just type a few things up and unleash your world on your target audience. It will be them that shape where the game heads or, at least, how it gets where I want it to. Plus you don't have to be at the office on time. But you also don't get paid. Maybe it's not like it at all. Hmm.

Oppositely from a dev though, an ST must constantly adapt and change the world as things progress. MMOs today might launch a new patch or an update or even an expansion somewhat regularly (or, if they're really short-sighted, they do nothing forgetting that to stagnate is to die).

My point being, maybe that void that needs to be filled in my gaming needs will never be filled by videogame entertainment. Unless, of course, they assign a different developer to each player, to shape the world as they make decisions and push against what has been established so far. So maybe I should stop hoping for revolutionary games and turn my attention elsewhere.

That said, I've been playing tabletop RPGs for some ten years but there are still things I haven't seen done or tried or explored. I've had a blast with every chronicle but I decided it was time to try and make one of my own to expose me and others to different views, approaches and even creatures. Let's just hope this endeavour doesn't die on the shore.

If you've never had the pleasure of trying this kind of game let me throw you a few notions. Forget about nerdy fat guys playing in their parents basement. Today's roleplayers have lifes, jobs and kids. Just like other gamers. They gather around a table with sheets representing their characters instead of a controller and a screen and make decisions based on what the Overlord (yeah, I like that term better) tells them. The Overlord plays God as in he/she controls the environment and NPCs. Players speak out their actions instead of pushing buttons. There are rules, of course, and they depend on what particular system you've chosen to play. We stick to White Wolf's old World of Darkness d10 system. It's more pickup&play than a d20 system, imho.

oWoD has a lot to explore. It's set in the modern world (take that with a grain of salt. Most of the books were written circa 1995) which makes the setting more familiar to most people than medieval dragon slaying. This does not by all means restringe gameplay to the modern era. No, they've provided settings and rules spanning from the Dark Ages to today. You can choose from playing a vampire, a werewolf, a mage, a scientific disbeliever, a demon, a ghost, a faerie, a hunter or just a mere mortal in the middle of all these interesting and cuddly creatures.

This has made for some interesting stories over the ages. Some I've experienced. Some I can't even remember but I'm told happened and I'm inclined to believe them. Like that one time when a couple of Victorian Age mages sat down with a boy who was the reencarnation of some poweful spirit or other to enjoy one of those new fangled "ice-cream" things. Commence a 30 minute debate about who's paying the bill. Exit scene with two mages and an ice-cream splattered child running for dear life. Sometimes players decide to abandon the plot completely and go "look for the Plague". And when that fails they decide to "invent the Plague". Others go meet important figures and "accidentaly kill them". Anything can and usually does happen when you present players with the ultimate sandbox.

Adorable. Just wanna get a kleenex and wipe the edges of his mouth
saying "there now, all better."

More than with any videogame character, players tend to get extremely involved with characters they get to create and incarnate. I've had a few, myself. From the crazy cab driver vampire to the finnish green-eyed black guy called Hill. Once I was a small vampire woman with delusions of grandeur who ended up becoming ruler of a city and demanded a throne made entirely of phonebooks. Another time I played a Nosferatu based on the Mouth of Sauron called Sirius Mann. He was actually quite friendly. During the Dark Ages I was a vampire bred from a line of soldiers who was aptly called Curtis E. Foot. Curtis went on to carry a big two-handed sword and repel guards as other party members went off with relics from roman catholic churches. In Rome.

I guess you had to be there.