Repose

Roleplaying

Yeah, it's something I do pretty frequently.  And why the hell not?  It entertains me cheaply and keeps me away from turning into a pimp or a drug mule (I'm undecided which of those has the best profit/risk ratio at the moment) and running away to Holland to pursue high living and low crime.

Where was I?  Ah, yes.  Ok, so I'm a big freaking geek.  I love sci-fi, Star Trek, Star Wars, all that junk.  But the distinction I must point out is that I'm functional.  I have a regular Joe job, I have a darling and if not well adjusted, at least not excessively unbalanced girl, I drink, dance and screw on a regular basis.

But like I said, I do like my roleplaying games.  Have done since school, but now - paradoxically - it's easier to organise a game with kids on a different damn continent than it is to gather a group that lives within about 30 minutes driving distance of each other.  Wrong, I say, just wrong.

Even so it's led to most of my roleplaying being done online now.  Star Trek is the current biggie.  I got this game, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force as part of a Star Trek "Action Pack" a while ago, and entertained myself with Armada and Armada 2 to start with simply because my computer didn't have the power to run Elite Force.

Eventually we got a bigger and better machine, and I was able to play EF.  This was sometime during summer 03, as I recall.  Having little in the way of a life I started playing online and quickly discovered that there was some kind of roleplaying option available.  I took this option to heart. 

I've got one primary character called Tiberius Smith, who can most often be found either in charge or manning the Science station, and one or two random secondary characters (Commander Johnson, Crewman Daniels).  I helped build up STRP, one of a number of groups, and started the USS Discovery serial game (a format which has since been replicated by others).

What's the appeal of roleplaying?  For me, it's obviously part escapism, but more than that it's a communal game, a group of people coming together thanks to a shared interest and working together to make a story.  It's like I sometimes say, we make new episodes of Star Trek.