Why did you stop playing Role Playing Games?

Serious answer... I don't know. It just kind of petered out as friends into that kind of thing got into other kinds of things (generally music, I guess, or computers, interests which themselves either petered out or else turned into careers). I've still got all my old Warhamer Fantasy Roleplay books and stuff in the loft I think, and every couple of years toy with the idea of playing it again, but with no GM and no fellow adventurers it seems pretty pointless. One of the problems when we were younger was the fact that we all wanted to adventure and no one wanted to GM, and what fun is that? Things like Zelda and what have you meant that you could adventure on your own, and SEE what was happening without having to rely on pesky imagination.

When I realised this was more insane than a pc in "Call of Chthulhu"
I gave up

I am struggling with the idea of someone going straight from Dungeons & Dragons to having a girlfriend. Surely there has to be a stage in between. Maybe I think too much of girls. Or maybe I don't understand role playing games.

(many, many girls also play rpgs, btw)

I always kind of prefered reading the sourcebooks and figuring out the worlds to actually playing the things. That's quite onanistic, isn't it? Well, I WAS a teenager. I still occaisionally dig out my Cthulu adventures and Rifts sourcebooks and sigh nostalgicly.

The last involved circle of RPG stuff I got involved with was in UCLA days and mainly because that was a very social and good group of friends. Indeed the core members were two couples who were going out before the whole thing got going and who are still together to this day.

hell, I was a die-hard Ultima freak for years.

Cthulhu was superb, though. Oh dear. Where's my copy of "Violator"?

x-post, if one were to do a pie chart of "vampire the masquerade" playaz, w/goths and non goths in different colours, what would it look like?

My middle-school friends and I did try a few actual games, but it always degenerated into fucking around and going off to play video games.

So my D&D game starts soon! It is the first campaign I have been in since I was 11?

We are playing fourth edition apparently which is kind of bummer but mostly just makes me feel really old and disconnected - like I grew up thinking 1st ed was 'real d&d' and 2nd edition was some fancy new thing? I'm 27? I might still be the youngest player! What kind of adult wants to play with miniatures when they could use the same books they had 20 years ago?

Anyway I am really pumped!

make a rule that everyone takes a shot if you roll a 20 on a 20 sided die

I... don't really intend to make things more social? I've never really played this sort of thing with people I was comfortable around, maybe that's the problem.

yeah i was lured back into a game after a 12-year hiatus (i am 33) based on the rave reviews for 4th edition. i found the heavy reliance on miniatures and maps in the new edition excessively grindy and tedious but then again i was always a snob about that sort of thing.

and anyway, as a habitual DM or GM, i have to say that this comment is right OTM

I guess really I didn't want to play the games so much as write swashbuckling adventures about pitfighters and trollslayers and wizards.

i'm about to start a pathfinder game this thurs and i really have no idea what that means

It means the people you are playing with are srs business! I am kind of jealous!

Yeah like in a sense the idea of fourth makes sense to me - like 85% of what you actually do is fight monsters, why not make that bit the focus of the game? But I sort of mentally can't accept and admit that I like fighting imaginary monsters.

it beats having imaginary arguments with climate change deniers, that's what I do

Played Paranoia ("the computer is your friend!"), Call of Cthulhu, and Twilight 2000 (GDW's post-WWIII rpg) occasionally with a regular group over bagged lunch in high school. In truth, quick games of Nuclear War and Junta were usually more fun. Weekend nights were sometimes devoted to exhausting marathon sessions of hex/cardboard counter wargaming.

In my first semester of college, I discovered that fellow gamers included a disconcertingly high number of the unwashed and otherwise unkempt, as well as approaching middle-age otakus of anime fandom (20 years ago, it wasn't the commonplace as later discovered in bulletin boards and the web). No females participated more than once.

I decided I wanted nothing to do with a subculture of bearded unbathed manchildren. Little did I know most would become millionaires through timely involvement in computer networking and the like...

played D&D with a small, violently closed group of friends from grade school into early high school. age 13-16 or so? during this period (80 - 83/84) also experimented with call of cthulhu, traveler, the star trek RPG, but none for long. D&D was it, all i ever needed. TSR augmented w/ CRAZY ASS chaosium and judge's guild add-ons. plus stuff we made up on our own. still have massive accumulations of dungeons and monsters and fantsy world scenarios/histories designed by my friends and i. seriously neglected art form. also played hella car wars, probably the best game ever. steve jackson i love you forever. anyway, later, in college, under the influence of massive greenish trees, i tried briefly to play some D&D again, also champions, but it never went anywhere. we mostly just drank and got high and goofed around. there was a also a period during which i was into magic cards, but i'm mostly trying to not remember that.

i like 4e but its the version of d&d that i started on. its tactically a lot more interesting in combat imo & its better balanced overall but it can sometimes feel like playing a live console SRPG.

I guess really I didn't want to play the games so much as write swashbuckling adventures about pitfighters and trollslayers and wizards

this is kinda my feeling about my pathfinder campaign

its tactically a lot more interesting in combat imo & its better balanced overall but it can sometimes feel like playing a live console SRPG.

tactical interestingness is, to me, the worst element of most RPGs and the reason i only ever cared about AD&D v.1. simple simple simple combat. roll some dice, subtract some HP, and that's it. no weapon specialization, hardly any special abilities, fixed ACs and hit charts. don't gotta worry about hit location or character orientation or any of that. just roll the dice move ur mice. leaves more room for the swashbuckling adventures abt.

so, what's 4td edition like?

does anyone remember this awesome rpg-parody-that-was-also-kinda-real called 'teenagers from outer space'

In answer to the thread title question: started age 13, stopped age 14. Realised that being on the school chess team, into computers, and in the top set for maths was probably nerd critical already. Also I just wasn't that interested. AD&D seemed a bit pointless, like there was something more important I "should" be doing, something that was connected to the real world. Which kind of makes my chess obsession all the more stupid. But there were rewards that made chess seem a part of reality - like hardsonning one of the best players in the school in a qualifying game to decide which six of us would play in an interschool match. Result: I played, he didn't.

never played any, but used to enjoy reading my mate's cyberpunk 2020 annual, because the backstory was pretty well thought out and the illustrations (technical manual style line drawings of phuture punx, cool weapons and extreme violence) were awesome.

sitting around rolling dice, filling out forms and pretending to be a character seemed like too much hard work, tho.

i tried to get into D&D when i was 14 or so but i soon realized i only really liked the character creation part

I was similar, interested in the mechanics and world-building way more than the actual playing (which was always pretty shambolic with us). That's why I always wanted to be gamesmaster - I liked reading the sourcebooks.

I would like to play War of the Ring or Descent: Journeys in the Dark one day (they get high ratings on board game geek and Fantasy Flight's rpgs are pretty simple to learn dice battle games - usually with figurines, a map and cards for items and spells with the rules on them).

I highly recommend playing a Fantasy Flight rpg sometime

the jackpot must be War of the Ring collector's edition. I didn't realize it has finally been released

Stared in my early teens, in the mid 80s, with a bunch of friends from school. Played all sorts of things all the way through to the mid 90s and kind of drifted away from it. I have no idea whether I'd play now, even if I had the opportunity.

Realised that being on the school chess team, into computers, and in the top set for maths was probably nerd critical already

hahahahaha

i tried merp. well kindov. didn't really have anyone to try it with. so i spent all my time making maps and designing game settings, for no particular reason other than my own sadistic pleasure.

although well before that, when i was about 13, my american friend tried to tell me about d&d and we were a bit excited by the concept. so i spent months designing this whole island and its npcs and treasure locations blah blah. which he played, with me as GM, but there were no dice or stats, it was all just verbal gameplay. good times really.

xp that still culminated in an anonymous phone call where the caller told me "we don't want you on our chess team, because you're a nerd!". I take a perverse pride in being too nerdy even for a chess team full of alpha nerds.

I feel like reading sourcebooks is such a totally different hobby to actually playing the things - like, different pleasure, different demographic, everything?

Lamp is your game very combat focussed? Do people try and game/minimax the combat? That is really my big worry with 4e, not having played it yet - if I'm playing a stupid character, will I end up saying things like 'well, it's got a 7 square movement, so I'll wait eight squares back", rather than "Gonjuru hates goblins! CHARGE"? I mean obviously the answer is 'not unless you want to' but I'm interested in the vibe the game sets up.

because 4e is so combat focused & because you're given so many build options it hard not to optimize your character, really. i mean the flavor of the powers is p minimal imo & the game works so much better if your character is well built that it doesnt really make sense to have a lot of role-play related combats. thats the balance weve struck: combat is almost a separate thing that plays a little video game-y i.e. tactically rather role play & then outside of combat we do more role play intensive, story-focused stuff w/ our characters.

obv it depends heavily on your dm (although if you're playing the prefab encounters they are tailored towards min/max style characters) & what sort of playing style they want to promote. & its totally possible to integrate your conception of your character into how you approach combat. but thats not really the way the game is built

Played all through high school (AD&D, TMNT and other Palladium nonsense, and then mostly Champions, plus various outbreaks of Car Wars and Blood Bowl). I usually GMed, because I liked the making up stories/lots of characters part. Finished when we all finished high school and went to different unis and such. The fun part was that since we knew the campaign was ending at the end of yr 12, we could do a BIG! DRAMATIC! FINALE! where lots of the ongoing villains finally bit the dust, plus lots of players heroically sacrificing themselves. Seemed very cool at the time.

Over last couple of years, have to admit to having downloaded various old White Dwarf and Dragon magazines from the 1980s/early 90s, and getting a strange nostalgic joy from reading them.

Lamp, thanks, that's a really good & useful post! I'm really encouraged that the RP stuff is still key, even if its moved outside of combat. I guess I'll start off playing a more calculating character to ease the initial dissonance there.

The fun part was that since we knew the campaign was ending at the end of yr 12, we could do a BIG! DRAMATIC! FINALE! where lots of the ongoing villains finally bit the dust, plus lots of players heroically sacrificing themselves. Seemed very cool at the time.

That sounds amazing tbh!

(Quick question - DM wants us to choose a char class & race before we start - any suggestions?)

i've never understood the miniatures and maps thing - surely the WHOLE POINT is that it all takes place in your imagination??

i used to play with a DM who would basically just make shit up on the fly - monsters, encounters, everything - and every single event would be decided by percentile dice (two 10-sided dice). i have to say that it made things very transparent and everything moved along very nicely.

i never played regularly though, that was at summer camp.

I instinctively don't like the miniatures for Tracer's reasons but I'm willing to try it - Lamp's defence (have the combat as a cool, balanced, videogamey interlude away from the rest of the roleplaying) makes sense to me maybe? I dunno.

I guess I will be a HUMAN WIZARD.

when i say i never understood them i mean that i literally have no idea why they are used or what they add..!

I think what they add/take away is like - your dudes are facing a load of goblin archers, somebody shouts 'charge!' - how many shots do the goblins get before you get to them, can I duck behind a pillar, etc?

Yeah, I like 4e D&D because combat is basically a tactical miniatures game. There's lots of character abilities that let you position yourself/your teammates/your opponents for best advantage and at least for me I find that to be really fun. Letting the DM make it all up in their head is sometimes really aggravating-- if there's miscommunication between the players and the DM they can wind up with totally different ideas of what's going on in a scenario. Playing with miniatures kind of obviates all that.

This happened!

Thanks to everyone on this thread, I had a much better idea what to expect thanks to it. It's fun playing ridiculously powered characters (20 in primary stats!) at level one, and having different roles in the party is really good - a real 'taking turns to shine' vibe. The rules are really really combat focussed though, like it was hard to tell because our GM was very "you see some merchants, just normal, nothing-special merchants" but I really don't like the stats for insight, intimidate etc - that should come from the PC imo.

Also the character builder is magic, such a good needed feature.

I played a human invoker fyi.

Yeah, the character builder is amazing. I wish I could convince the other players in my group to use it. Glad you had a good time playing 4E.

does online RPGing exist, do they have software now that GM's can use to automate all the die throwing and stat recording etc? Obv they'd all need to be in direct voice communication still with each other (or not?)

just curious

I think online playing exists to some extent, though it does not sound that appealing.

My own RPGing has petered out a bit thanks to players producing children, but one day it will return.

tend to stick to games i can pick up and play for ten-fifteen mins at a time like PES or Tekken or w/e tbh.

Lack of multiplayer options also factored in

oh wait this isn't about computer games nm

I panned an indie film set in this world -- well, set in Austin actually -- so I'm bracing for possible flaming from nerd hordes.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/zero-charisma