MMORPG – Azerothian Introductions

One of the main ways I’ve gamed over the past decade (seriously, that long, dang….) has been in Azeroth (like so many other millions of people). From my first tentative forays into the world (including a very humorous trip swimming up continent) to running a raiding guild for a period of time, my time in Azeroth has been rewarding and has led me to a ton of friendships.

I can still remember the first time I was introduced to the game. A friend of mine from work knew I liked dice games and offered me his free trial discs (yes, the game at one point shipped with actual discs to install the game from and included free trial discs to give to your friends). I installed it that night and was hooked. My Tauren hunter Oorg was born and I never looked back. My wife (then fiancée) told me we would not be spending a penny on an online game. I nodded my head, content to settle for the 10 days of time I would get to play. Fast forward to a few days later, she storms in from the office, livid at the treatment she’d received from one of the lawyers at the firm. I promptly sat her down and she rolled up a warrior. Kissed her good night and went off to sleep (it was a Friday, I was due to open the bar the next morning). I wake up the next day, and she’s still sitting there, slaughtering zombies in Silverpine Forest. That night, we signed up for our accounts. These days, she doesn’t melee. However, she’s one wicked holy priest. Together we’ve rampaged against the worst enemies Azeroth has ever seen, healer and tank together.

I’ve seen couples fall apart because games got in the way of their relationship. Truth be told, it’s not been all idyllic for us either. Priorities weren’t always in the right place, but we talked it out and moved on. That said, the games have been immensely helpful to us, giving us a way to spend time together, albeit unconventionally. Granted, it has made for interesting conversations sometimes, and a fair bank of inside jokes, but I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.

That’s about all I’ve got in the tank tonight, we’ll definitely be talking more about this in the future, but until then, stay frosty and roll perception adventurers!

~Dramasailor

Play-By-Post: The Re-Emergence

So yeah, I am not great at this blog thing. It’s been over a year since my first content post. Oops.

Anyway, I may as well get back on the horse and continue on!

Last time, I talked about my first play-by-post experience on the now defunct site, Vagrant Space. Over the last year, I’ve been satisfying that PbP itch at a lovely site called GamersPlane. It’s been a wild ride, to say the very least. I’ve made a few really nice friends there and switched most of my play over to Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Keleth, the site runner there, has done a bang-up job providing a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere for all manner of gamers to come together.

For those intrigued, I highly recommend checking the site out. With new games starting up all the time, there’s always something interesting happening.

As for this blog, I’d like to try making this a weekly post at a minimum. Not sure how well it will work, but I’m certainly going to give it a go.

As always adventurers, roll perception!

~Dramasailor~

Play-by-Post: My First Space Tale

I suppose it’s high time I make my first real content post. While I may have started my gaming career in earnest sitting around a dorm table early on a Saturday morning (I know, how not stereotypical!), I quickly found that it wasn’t all tables and dice and laughter. There were other options to meet with people of similar mindsets and have fun building a rich adventure with one another. Cut back to the end of summer, 2004. My roommate and I, avid gamers both, finally settled into our dorm room after the summer break. As we sat in our sweltering room (the AC was broken. In New Orleans. In August.), we began chatting about what we had done that summer and how our year was looking so far.

“Have you heard of this site before? Called Vagrant Space?”

I had not. Come to find out, it was a marvelous site, built by an associate of my roommate, dedicated to RPG-style gaming through narrative story telling on a message board. I was interested, but a bit confused. How can things like combat work without dice?! What about XP? But, being a good roommate, away and went and up I signed. Before long, I was thrust deep into an enchanting world of spaceships and lasers and mystic-technobabble. I was hooked.

For those that don’t know about Play-By-Post gaming, here was the rough idea :

A storyteller (GM, DM, game master, whatever you want to call them) would start up a single thread for a story. Your profile on the website was your character. It contained all things pertinent: your skills, your race, your background, your possessions, everything. If you were interested, you would drop into the story, posting in character what you were doing and how you were interacting. The storyteller would interject as needed to create tension, resolve combat disputes, set scenes. Really everything a DM would do at their table through words and body language, the storyteller had to accomplish through text alone. Sure, we had some rich text support (bold and italics I think were the only supported modifications to text), but other than that, the world unfolded only in our heads and through our text entries. You would write out everything, going only so far as to taking your own action. Then, the storyteller would take your inputs, along with all the inputs from all the other players in the scene, and would weave them together into whatever tapestry they saw fit. Combat mechanics were usually settled by a description of actions taken and then looking at your relative skill levels. So if you had Pistols at a 12, and you were shooting at someone that had Duck and Cover at a 3, chances are you hit them. But if you tried to describe it that you were diving out of a window, rolling across the broken glass on the pavement, drawing your gun as you go and shooting at the back of someone 200 feet from you. Well, you might just not pull that off. Storyteller’s discretion.

I spent probably 18 months, off and on, posting to Vagrant Space. I got a wild hair a few months ago, when I started back up in the Play-by_Post world, and went searching for the site to see where it was, if it still existed. Sadly, it seems to have closed, several years ago. I miss the days of haranguing about space with friends from afar. Thankfully, I’ve managed to find some new awesome sites that support this kind of gaming. Hooray for technology.

 

Everyone, roll perception!

– Dramasailor

Blog Creation

Well, here we are. My blog’s “Session 0”, so to speak.

My intent here is to talk about all manner of RPG and Tabletop gaming things. This could be how it impacts my life, my thoughts on mechanics and tropes, or even reviews of materials by my favorite publishers.

I’m happy to have you all in my party for this, and I look forward to our adventure!

Everyone – roll perception!

– Dramasailor