RPG- Role Playing Gaming
Role Play to most people, the first thought is sexual games. But We are nerds / geeks and to us its, books, pencils, character sheets, terrain, maps, dice, and miniatures. Unless you are LARPing but that is another topic. My favorite part of role playing is making characters either by dice or other means. Writing the stats, skills, feats, and equipment down on paper. Then taking that character and running it through a story. As I talk and act like the character and start to bring it to life.
There are many different games with many different dice and other systems to run a campaign. I play a lot of D20 systems but have read many other systems and even some experience in those other systems. I want to widen my experience and am always willing to try another system. I tend to like to play and run multiple campaigns much like I write my Shadowed Stars books following different characters throughout assigned book numbers. This helps me with my attention and detail. Keeping things fresh and yet having that feeling of getting back to other characters and campaigns that I enjoy. The more campaigns I run and play in, reduces the feeling of one character becoming tiresome.
I find as my characters get higher in levels that they get harder to play. I want my character to grow and change but, in some cases, too much will make me feel lost with that character as it changes and plays differently and sometimes it just don’t feel like the character I originally enjoyed so much.
I also like the role playing like I do the elaborate board game, miniature, dice, and card playing games where I am at a table and physically playing with others that are present around the table with me. I am not as big a fan of playing over computers or virtually.
I enjoy the players and the characters working together as a team but I also like to play my characters with fun and sometimes recklessness. I am a stay with the party guy and a runoff on my own guy. It really depends on my character. It seems that characters to me are more fun when I fully unleash and let the character make the decisions, this often leads me down the fun and reckless path.
I enjoy playing and running RPGs. The challenge of running a campaign be it a dungeon master, storyteller, game master, narrator or whatever the term the specific game calls it is not so much the planning the adventure but keeping the player characters from straying too far off the planned adventure. I find that there must be a little freedom allowed so that the players have fun but trying to keep that all in a planned story is hard. If you allow players total freedom, they can run away with the game. Along the same lines, if you try too hard to keep on story plan, you risk the player not enjoying the game. It is a delicate balance.