#mg forums

Highlights from the "Truth about the Guard".

a reminder that <The Stormwind Guard> is fucking trash. Every single one of them who sticks by them through this.

ok but why are people vocally approving of khorrosh.

We did nice already. Can we do a game where you message a person and tell them what kind of things (keeping it relatively PG-13) you would do with them. 

For example: I send an ask to tumblruser1: "I would go kayaking with you." They message me back with: "I would go backpacking with you."

The more outlandish, the better.

I don't usually log into the game these days. Generally, I'll only go in for RP events. Tonight, though, I expected that Pavane/Larry might want to contact me -- again, I was right. He sent me seven in-game mail letters which I will post in a moment, but he also immediately started to /whisper me.

Maybe my philosophy of letting people RP what they want stems from coming up in a pen&paper context. My older brothers had D&D and I had my first character when I was about 4. Dude was a total self-insertion and even named after me. That was also the last time I played a healer.

The thing about pen&paper was that while there were thousands of RP groups out there, none of that mattered to you. You RPed with your friends. What the dude in the next garage did had no impact on your campaign -- and you didn't know anything about it unless he happened to write a letter to Dragon magazine asking for help dealing with the munchkin that was ruining his games.

There was no way to peer over the shoulder of people outside your group, and while you might secretly laugh at your friend's half-elf rogue/warrior/priest of Vecna he was still your friend. You were on the same team, building the same world, living the same campaign.

The internet brought lots of people together for RP. You didn't need to rely on face-to-face meetings or worry that you lived in the hinterlands surrounded only by bikers. You could find like-minded people to RP with.

Problem is, you also had the veil of anonymity and RP became crystallized in text rather than existing only as speech. People were able to start critiquing RP and could remove it from the organic context of play and turn the process into the object.

When you were sitting around a table with your friends, you didn't worry about whether or not you spoke in several paragraphs or used fancy words. No one was going to analyze what you said -- they just wanted to know when your move was over so they could roll the 20-sided die.

Now we RP self-consciously. There are all these made up rules about "doing it right" and lots of RPers struggle to keep a low enough profile through average this and average that so that they can escape notice all together.

Sites that mock RP or RP profiles aren't about writing. We know that. They are about getting a cheap laugh at the expense of some roleplayer who can't do a damn thing about it. But, shipmates, if we take a step back we see that all roleplay is ridiculous. We are all jokes.

This is one of the nerdiest pastimes to exist in recorded history. We are pretending to be elves living in fairyland. Dude, once you take that step, are you really ready to bash some fella because you don't think his elf has the "right" eye color?