During the summer I had been exposed to brief glimpses of a 'WoD Game,' wherein the various games that take place in the White-Wolf Games Studios World of Darkness intermingle for one reason or another. Two friends of mine were playing types of were-creatures [a bear and coyote to be exact], one guy I didn't know was playing a 'newly Awakened Mage' [which meant nothing to me at the time], and yet another was some sort of 'techno-mage' [again, nothing]. I wasn't really too aware of what was going on, but became intrueged enough that when school started and there was talk of a vampire LARP [or 'Masque' as they're sometimes called here] I agreed to try it out.
Now, I'd never before been interested in vampires really and was actually pretty wary of the whole game until I got a better idea of what it was and met some people that were 'normal' that played. Once I made my first character [a Ravnos journalist who was compelled to seed small lies into just about every conversation he had], it was all out of my hands.
For a writer that was often too lazy to actually write, roleplaying came as a very natural thing; sure I'm not the greatest actor in the world, and it shows, but interacting with others as a fictional character with a fictional plotline to explore is entertainment enough for me to try.
The LARP was being run in the shadow of a several-year-long game that had just ended [Dixie By Night] and at the beginning we had alot of interaction with some of the gamers from that 'chronicle' that had formed a LARP in Memphis. After a while they got bored and started over as a Sabbat game with a different experience scale so we had to cut off the 'cross-over' we'd been playing. Characters came and went [Stan A. Tanson, the deranged rich caitiff], and then so did our site. The game slowly faded from there on.
However by that time I'd picked up a position in a new game that was being started. Table-top based, it was called Aberrant was an entirely different experience. Because it had just come out we started playing when the ST was still getting into the rules, and we really had no concept of just how powerful the characters were. Within two sessions our characters had accidently killed almost as many people as we had been hired to take care of [A rag-tag, literally or at least close, group of mercenaries. Yeah. My character was a former private investigator that was really good at investigation, was a bit 'super-tough', and could do some minor electrical damage and he still accidentally killed two people], and got involved with all sorts of other crazy mishaps.
The next game I played in, run by my current room-mate, is known as the 'God Hates Vehicles' game whenever it's spoken of. Basically the plot involved a pilot who could manipulate air, my rich eccentric thrill-seeker luck-magnet, and a speeding ex-security gaurd running around trying to figure out who was getting us in trouble and worrying if every car we climbed into would have some sort of lethal malfunction [the game pretty much started with a plane blowing up].
Since then I've had some different experiences via different storytellers...but usually it's a combination of the same group of people so the situations have enough simularity that they can be [with few exceptions] lumped together.
So, you might ask, why have I mentioned all of this to you?
Simple.
Mostly just so that when I go on to write other pieces in this section of my site you might know better where I'm coming from on a particular subject. I also want to make it clear that, while I fully understand more serious gaming is not only an option but something I like to experience every so often, I in no way think that gaming ever needs to be anything but entertaining to the players. Sure other things are good, and if you can do more than 'entertain' that's great...but if you've got that basic part of the experience nailed down then don't worry about the rest.
Just have fun.
UPDATE 11/17/03: Well... I wrote this sometime during the summer of 2001, and things hae changed for me a little. My basic views are still the same, but my experience has varied greatly. The various things I could rant about belong in their own space, but suffice to say that I've been in many different games (with new and old faces) and seen quite a few new systems since then. It's still all about having "the fun."