I Miss Role-Playing

 I Miss Role-Playing

I mean, the title pretty much says it all, yeah? Let's back up for just a minute, okay?

When I was in high school, some friends of mine played D&D and thought it was something I would really enjoy. I gave it a shot, but was overwhelmed by the numbers and it just didn't click for me. Too much prep, too little gaming (in my mind, anyway), and so it didn't stick for me. Fast forward a couple of years to my...sophomore year of college? I'm confident it was my sophomore year, anyway. My friend Tara asked me if I'd be up for playing Vampire: The Masquerade with her and her friends. I could not possibly decline that invitation quickly enough. But then she said, "Think of it as an acting exercise." That was what hooked me. "Yeah, okay, I'll give that a shot." So I played with her group, and I just really enjoyed the hell out of it. The game was so focused on role-playing and the system was so light on math that I was able to really dig right in and play. That group graduated from SUNY Geneseo, and so it behooved me to build a new RPing group. So I pulled together such a group and we continued playing Vampire. But in doing so, it wasn't long before we started learning about other games. Not just White Wolf games like Changeling, but Savage Worlds (Ripper in particular was a favorite). And while my first Vampire campaign really felt more indulgent (if there was a thing we wanted to do as characters, we mostly just got to do it), the subsequent games and campaigns evolved to be much more story-oriented. There were consequences for choices, and characters fell from grace or died, and it wasn't always with glorious purpose or in a brilliantly memorable blaze.

After college, I stumbled into a regular D&D game as run by the designer at Theatre of Youth where I was working as an actor. I had not played D&D since high school, but these seemed like great people who I wanted to spend more time with, and so I gave it another shot. It was 3.5, and it stuck this time. It helped that my friend Ken used a program to handle all the mathing required of anyone playing 3.5. I could think of the character in a narrative context, and Ken could help me navigate the reality of using the system, as well as the role of my character within the group. This was also my first experience with getting together with a group of folks who used this opportunity to eat dinner and do some drinking and snacking while playing. It was just terrific, and I was happy to be a part of this every week or so. It was the first time I wasn't "just gaming," but this was actually a way to spend an evening. It might be a weird distinction, but it marked a bit of a turning point for me and how I treated and experienced gaming.

From D&D, I tried running Deadlands, but pretty unsuccessfully. That was my first real experience as a storyteller with being told that my players felt as though they were being railroaded. I learned a lot from Deadlands, even though we only played a couple of sessions. We then moved into Scion. And that turned into quite a lot of fun, and the group changed and expanded again from the D&D group I had first joined. It wasn't as regular, but we tried to keep it to every two weeks.

Then I moved to St. Louis. I knew exactly one person in St. Louis - a friend of my mentor who I had met with once to talk about the theatre scene in St. Louis. That was it. I had moved to be closer to a woman I wanted to date, Kristina, who wasn't even in St. Louis! She was doing her medical residency at Mizzou in Columbia, MO, which is two hours away! But I couldn't see myself living there, whether the relationship went well or fell apart, and so I chose to live in St. Louis. I got very lucky with the job I landed in that the people who worked there immediately welcomed me into their most excellent family, and so I made new friends and family a little more than a month after I moved to STL. That was absolutely key. I knew I'd find more kin once I was cast in some shows, but I didn't know when that would happen. At that point, I hadn't gotten a lot of callbacks, and I had sort of missed a lot of auditions that would cover shows that would be running through the end of the year (as I arrived in St. Louis at the end of September).

I knew I wanted to be gaming, but wasn't sure how to go about it. At this point, I was still looking to RP. I had gotten into games like Catan, Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Plague and Pestilence, and Dominion in the last couple of years or so of living in Buffalo. But I still preferred RPing to board and card games. Overall, anyway. So I went onto MeetUp and put it out there that I wanted to run a Changeling: The Lost game for 3-5 people. I got insanely lucky in who answered, as this would set the stage for some of my closest friendships in St. Louis, as this is how I met Cushman (who I mentioned several times, most recently in two of my gaming recaps posted here and here) and Biff (who is also included in those recaps, and wrote a guest post about Good DM Practices). Absolutely some of my closest friends, and friends I made through this 9 month Changeling campaign, but then our friendships outlasted that campaign by years.

I mean, we don't go years without seeing each other's dogs, but this is still kinda accurate!

Anyway, while Changeling was going, it was a weekly game. Every Tuesday night. We missed one here and there, especially when I was doing a show and had rehearsals. But otherwise, every Tuesday night. And I loved it. It could be kinda stressful sometimes because the players were excellent, and so the story often evolved in unexpected directions, which required an ability to pivot frequently. But as I got busier and busier with my theatre company and some friends in the group began moving away (they were Air Force, so they either got deployed or a new assignment), we lost any regularity. I tried to pop in online from time to time, but it just proved frustrating for everyone because I was inconsistent. And when I did pop in, they had to bring me up to speed because I just didn't know what was going on. Plus, we ended up playing systems with which I wasn't very familiar, such as Edge of the Empire or Rogue Trader.

Then came the nail in the coffin for role-playing (for me, anyway): my kiddo. Once he was born, no matter how much I asserted otherwise, I just didn't have time to RP. Between my theatre company and being a stay-at-home parent, I just didn't have the time to commit. Because the way I learned to love RPing meant I wasn't just showing up to each session: I was reading the source books outside of gaming. If I was running, I was prepping for games. If I was playing, I had to have a handle on what was happening in-game, and we made some decisions out of game. We had regular e-mail chains going. And I just enjoyed all that. When I wasn't able to commit to all of it, despite the understanding of my friends, *I* just wasn't enjoying it enough to prioritize it. Plus, by this time, I was HARD into board games. Far less consistency needed for board games, and no need to play the majority of games with the same group. Oftentimes, it felt like far less homework.

Finally, at this point, any RPing I was going to do with the group I loved RPing with was going to be online. And honestly, I just don't like gaming online. I've tried it a bunch of times, and I just don't enjoy it. I find it to be stressful more than anything else, and often is just a reminder of what I used to have and now miss. It's not fair and not entirely logical, but it's just where I land.

To that end, I've gotten in a very limited amount of role-playing in 2021, and that's been real great. My core group started doing one-shots once a month at the beginning of the year. And though that tapered off after the first several months, I'm confident that we can get back to the practice because it's imminently doable and so much damn fun. Additionally, there's a really casual group here in St. Louis that I met a couple of years ago and we played some D&D before COVID, and then we played some online during COVID. That has fallen off too, but I'm looking forward to getting back to it. Finally, I do have one *big* one shot I'm looking to run online for my college RPing group by the end of the year. I've been remiss in following up with it, but it will happen, by hook or by crook!

All of this to say that I MISS ROLE-PLAYING. But no matter how many times I rearrange my schedule and my life, I just don't have the room to do it consistently right now. And the result is that trying to do so stresses me out and frustrates me, and the cons of a regular game outweigh the pros. But I still buy books, and I still read them from time to time, and I will write down ideas for a chronicle on a Post-It note every now and again. And one day? One day, I'll get back to RPing in a regular way, and it will be glorious.