My Role playing

To start let me make 1 point perfectly clear. I do not consider video games to be role playing games. To me role playing games are a shared experience of people sitting around a room or table, interacting personally, face to face. Playing a video game with other people, even if those other people are thousands of miles away, is cool, but it ain't role playing.

I have been playing role playing games since the summer between my 6th and 7th grades when my then cousins (my aunt's 2nd husbands kids) introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons at a family reunion. I have been playing these games in some fashion or another for almost the entire time since then.

I have been in the same core role playing group now for something like 10 years. The core of the group is myself, Forrest and Carl. Over the years we have added Stephan, Dale, Justin, Nancy and occasionally Jennifer. Other people have come and gone but this is the core. Traditionally Forrest runs the games. We have played Deadlands, 7th Seas, a Firefly variation of Deadlands, D&D, Shadowrun, and various other games. It is a very good group, very tight and very friendly. We normally play every 2 weeks, although that varies depending on the seasons (we play less during the holidays).

Since we have been playing so long as a group we generally feel free to stretch our limits when we want to with our characters. As a long standing veteran I feel very comfortable with the rules for most systems, and usually I am Forrest's back up when he doesn't know a rule.

Overall it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of table talk and just normal interaction between the players, both as part of the game and outside the game. In fact, if we have missed a couple of sessions we often will end up talking more than playing during a normal session.