LFGryph

Fridays are about to get busier over in Gryph’s world. 🙂 A friend of mine is starting up a new Pathfinder campaign and with any luck I’ll be jumping into that next week. (For those unfamiliar, it’s pen and paper roleplaying, similar to Dungeons and Dragons.) We’ll see what that does to my attempted schedule over here – go fig, I decide to start writing more with my free time and I add a couple more regular livestreams to my schedule. I’m certainly not complaining though!

A few of my friends initially told me that updating three times a week was being hard on myself, but I swear it made sense when I started. >_> In any case, it gives me an excuse to write about gaming that isn’t limited to video games.

For anyone who knows me at all, the GM running the new campaign is the same one who ran the game I’m forever telling stories about – the campaign indirectly responsible for two of my DC Universe Online characters. My main villain, Kechara, is based on the character I played in that game; and my main hero, Llydis, started as a female version of one of my friends’ characters. The DCUO characters have changed over the time that I’ve played – especially with my slight addiction to trenchcoats and fedoras – but they did start out based more completely on the Pathfinder characters.

I find it interesting that for someone who loves pen and paper roleplaying, I so rarely seriously RP in my video games. The Secret World, as one example, has a committed and welcoming RP community; I’m forever planning on getting involved and haven’t yet. I tend to assume it’s because I lean towards being completionist in my gaming so I feel like I don’t have the time to RP on top of that (and that’ll be something else to talk about one of these days) but I think it might also be that when I play an MMO, I inject enough of myself into the character that I find myself having trouble investing in their own story. That’s probably also one reason I rarely if ever play male characters in MMO’s – I want that “character as expression of myself” kick. That might change in TSW specifically once I get my alts leveled up, but I’ll have to see what happens. I already have the “me-ish” character, it might be easier for me to step back with the other ones.

I’m just guessing here, but I think I might have reservations about the gray area between character-as-character and character-as-me. I can play something like Final Fantasy VI and do things out of character for myself because I am clearly playing another character. I can play and enjoy something like Myst or an MMO because I’m free to play as myself (within the limits of the game). So…..when given the choice to play either way, I’m really pretty happy with myself? I suppose I could take it that way if I wanted to, but that seems an awfully self-important excuse not to RP. 😛 It’s a shame considering how much I enjoy writing; I’ve had more than one friend mention that RP is great for practicing characterization.

I’ll have to see if being back in a pen and paper game influences my other gaming this time around. There’s definitely much fun to be had playing as someone else. In the previous Pathfinder campaign, I’d really wanted Kechara to be Chaotic Good but I also had to be the special-snowflake of a Changeling/Catfolk character so she wound up Chaotic Neutral instead. She was still a blast to play, but I feel like I spent a lot of time trying to nail down her character as opposed to playing it.

I know enough folks who do pen and paper RP games that I imagine I’ll add that to my rotating topics here, preferably in a little more depth than in this post. If there’s anyone on here who hasn’t caught them already, I’d also very much recommend the Counter Monkey videos that Spoony does, both for fun pen and paper stories and some great advice. (adult language for those who care) It looks like we’ll be streaming Pathfinder again this time – I’ll be shouting out the sessions on Twitter, and I’ll link here to Odin’s channel in case anyone wants to come watch us play. He runs a great game, I’d recommend it even if I wasn’t planning to join in!