RPGs and Me
When I asked for suggestions on what to blog about Mr Teufel commented, “I first met you on RPG.net, IIRC, but you’ve never blogged about roleplaying - past or present - that I’ve seen.” He is right, I have never blogged about it, but now I am going to correct that.
The vast majority of roleplayers are introduced to roleplaying in their teenage years where they spend hours surrounded by dice, character sheets and rulebooks. My introduction was an unusual one and sealed my fate as a cybergeek. In my first year of university in 1993, a school friend of mine introduced me to her friends that were hanging out in the computer lab mudding. MUDs are basically online text based roleplaying games and the MUD I was introduced to on this fateful day was Ancient Anguish which was an online version of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). It was also my first introduction to the internet - and I was hooked on both fronts. My school friend never mudded with us after that first day, but I joined the group of mudding geeks and my obsession with mudding began. Because of I was doing an education degree at the time, I was given an internet account that only gave me 100 hours online. When you are mudding anywhere from 2 hours to 8 hours plus a day, those 100 hours don’t last a long time, soI quickly learnt how to hack into our university computer system and “steal” internet time.
I mudded on Ancient Anguish for the next 8 years and learnt all about hit points, spell points, types of weapons, types of armours and the pros and cons of different races and classes without ever picking up a D&D rulebook.
My first encounter with D&D wasn’t until 2000 when my girlfriend Lelak, a roleplayer from way back and a group of my friends interested in learning about roleplayering had our very first session. There were a few difference between mudding and roleplaying, like rolling the dice, but I quicked it up fairly quickly and just as quickly fell in love with it. Most of our friends weren’t that enamoured with roleplaying, but Lelak and I together with our friends V and S formed a roleplaying group that meet together fairly regularly to play not only D&D, but Witchcraft and Exalted as well. With other roleplaying groups, I also played Call of Cthulhu and Buffy.
Unfortunately, it has been almost 2 years since I have played a game. Our core roleplaying group has pretty much disintegrated. We tried to organise a few games this year, but they never happened. I am really missing roleplaying and I think it might be time to seek out new people to game with. Anyone in Sydney want to game with two lesbian gamers?
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Tags: cybergeek, geek, internet, mudding, roleplaying, RPGs
