LogFAQs > #883979379

shadowsword87 posted...

Sure, I'll call your bluff. If you can set up a Basic D&D game, or an AD&D game, I will play it with you.

I will even learn how to play, so nobody has to teach me.

Try me.

Well, to "call my bluff", you'd still have to agree to come to NJ first. Probably more than once or for a prolonged period of time unless you just wanted it to be a one-shot.

And "set up" implies I'd be doing any of the work - I'm not invested enough to care to drag together people I haven't played with in years to play a game I almost never play solely to "prove" something to you that doesn't really need to be proved anyway. I was mostly just off-handedly saying I could TRY to track down those two players if you showed up with a game in tow as a joke. Though realistically, I haven't talked to the AD&D kid for about 20 years now (the Basic D&D kid I still see about once or twice a year, but he hasn't RPed in about 15 years or so either - in fact, he gave me all of his D&D and WW books about 10 years ago).

If I was going to try to drag players into a game, at this point the most likely candidates would be my friend who literally just had a new baby a week ago, and maybe my nephew who wants to learn how to RP (and who has watched Critical Role) but who has zero experience beyond HeroQuest.

Keep in mind, we've already established that I don't really have an active RP circle, and don't really feel like pulling one together. So I don't have a ton of people willing to jump to join a new game on the spur of the moment (because if I did, I'd probably be running/playing in one). Which is why most of the stories I DO tell are from games that happened 10+ years ago.

And you're not going to reverse-psychology trick me into going out into the world and desperately tracking down a new group of RPers just to prove you wrong, because I already shot that idea down in the D&D topic.

RP is like going to war. When you're young it's an intense experience you go through, then you eventually go home, and then when you're old you sit around boring young kids by just telling all your war-stories over and over again.

Oh, and...



shadowsword87 posted...

it was all just you playing the game with yourself.

The closest I ever got to this was probably when I'd sit around and make a dozen NPCs for games I knew I was never going to run (though there was always that voice in the back of your head going "Maybe someday, you'll run a game and use these people"). But even then, I was mostly doing it as a side hobby while still actively playing online games.

The next closest might be when I write backstories for a PC that imply they've already been through campaigns you've never heard of or seen because they're so damned complicated and have a bunch of NPCs tied to them even before the first game. But that's actually rare (I've probably only done it for about a half-dozen different characters across multiple systems).

Most of the time, if I was in an RPish mood and didn't have a game to serve as an outlet for it, gamebooks like Lone Wolf or Fabled Lands would scratch that itch, or later on, games like Fallout: New Vegas or BioWare stuff like Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

They actually used to make "solo game" RPGs in the 80s, but it was never a thing that really appealed to me. I've never even used the "solo mode" they have in Advanced HeroQuest. RP's always been too collaborative for me to see it as anything other than a group activity.

I've never been entirely adverse to two-person sessions, though. I've played (and run) a fair amount of two-person Amber, and most online games are just a succession of scenes involving 2-3 people strung together over time.


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