My Roleplaying History

This post was originally intended to be a post explaining my view on what "roleplaying" is, particularly roleplaying in a computer game. I thought I'd start it off with a quick introduction of my history with roleplaying, but that quick introduction soon turned into a massive post. Probably larger even than what I had originally intended the post to be. So instead I'll post this separately and keep the rest for another time.

When I was young my grandparents once game me a box set for a translation of the German roleplaying game "Das Schwarze Auge" (The Dark Eye in English). I didn't really understand it at the time, I was too young, and consequently it spent several years stuck in a cupboard. Untouched. Then, when I got older, I decided to check it out and it opened up a new world for me. The game introduced you to the concept of roleplaying very cleverly. More so than I've ever seen any other roleplaying game do since. Rather than start you with a bunch of rules and why those rules are important, the "book of rules" literally tells you to start with the "book of adventure" instead, which is the second book included in the basic boxed set. And this one starts with a story. A story that the book tells you to imagine someone is telling you.

It doesn't last long. Pretty soon the 'listener' interrupts the storyteller, complaining about the stupid decision the main character makes. "Alright," says the storyteller, "then what would you have done?" It then goes on to slowly introduce the concept of roleplaying. Of a storyteller (or "Master" as the game calls it) presenting situations and the player making choices. It introduces dice rolling and combat. And then it turns into a choose-your-own-adventure style story for the second third of the book, where you get presented with choices, each directing you to different numbered paragraphs. Only then does it suggest reading the book of rules. The final third of the book of adventure is a short adventure for a small group of players that you, now taking the role of the Master yourself, can have some friends play through. After you read the rules.

It was brilliant and that's exactly what I did. Using a second boxed set which contained cardboard cutouts of walls and doors and figures I did lead an adventure for some of my friends. And I created my own (crappy) adventures to play through. Though I didn't run as many games as I would've liked; most of my friends didn't seem all that interested. Even so, my growing up is tied a lot to this game. I remember that the first time I took a bus ride to another city on my own it was because the local toy store had stopped selling this game, but one in a nearby city still had a few books. So I went there and spent all my allowance on buying a couple of new adventure books. I remember sitting there in a corner on the first floor excruciating over the decision of which books to buy as I couldn't afford them all. In the end I bought a couple of choose-your-own-adventure style books and a couple of group adventures. I played the solo ones much more, particularly the Nedime one is still one of my all-time favourites, but even the group ones taught me a lot.

It would take a few more years before I really found a group of people interested in roleplaying, thanks to a friend of my brother who introduced us to Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, and more (including Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Necromunda). We played all of it. Though with the roleplaying games we never tended to stick to the same campaign for more than a few sessions, too eager to try out new characters and new places. Even so, this is where I feel I truly first started roleplaying, before it had mostly been playing with rules. I started actually getting into various different characters and playing as them, rather than as me happened to be dropped in a fantasy setting. A dwarven noble. An Asian assassin seeking to destroy those more powerful than her. A drow priestess dedicated to her goddess. And I took on the role of Dungeon Master a fair few times. I loved making adventures for my friends to go to (a bit better ones this time), though they rarely went the way I expected. One summer vacation while camping with my parents I recall spending weeks designing a grand adventure set in a group of ancient Egyptian pyramids. I'd done a lot of research into ancient Egypt and their burial rites. I don't recall if I even ended up playing that adventure. And I recall spending a long time being very fascinated with the Amber Diceless Roleplaying game. I had read the books and thought this was the ideal way to tell stories and focus on the roleplaying, but none of our friends wanted to play it. They didn't trust the lack of dicerolling.

As I went to university the group drifted apart more and we didn't play as much anymore. I do recall designing my own roleplaying system, called "Willing Adventurers", specifically created to roleplay even with just two people wherever possible rather than needing the whole group to gather each time. It was a combination of Warhammer and Dungeons & Dragons and at least we got a few more fun games out of that. But most of my roleplaying gaming shifted to the computer.

Computers were already an important part of my life, ever since my dad bought a Commodore 64. He knew that computers were going to be big and wanted to go with the times. I ended up spending more time with it than he did. And later bought my own Commodore Amiga. My first computer. And I played a lot of games, including RPGs, on it. Games such as the Eye of the Beholder games, the Menzoberranzan game, though this was well before I got into drow or even really knew what they were, Ultima VI, Dark Sun, The Bard's Tale, and Ravenloft. But all these games are more dungeon crawlers than roleplaying games. Or at least that's how I played them. They seemed to be about going into these complex dungeons and killing things. There was very little interaction or ways to express your character's personality. (Ultima was different, but I never really understood it or get that into it). I never really roleplayed a character in them.

That started to change when I went to university and started living on my own. First with Fallout (and later Fallout 2). These games really seemed to encourage you to think about your character, to get in the shoes of your character. And your character really seemed to be someone instead of a fairly anonymous collection of stats. Your character had quirks. You got to have conversations with other characters. You got to make choices none of which were necessarily right or wrong, but they did have consequences. And in the second one you got to sleep with and then (be forced to) marry another girl. It was brilliant and, though I didn't quite realise it at the time, eye opening.

Then my brothers friend said "hey, you like RPGs then you should check out this new game called Baldur's Gate".

I installed the game and went into character creation. But then I saw you could use a custom portrait. So I went through my fantasy art collection to find a nice elf lady to play. But then I noticed that you could also change the colour of your skin, including to obsidian black (with white hair). I had just gotten into drow and though you couldn't officially play one, you could play an elf that looked like one, which was enough for me at the time. So I went into my Menzoberranzan boxed set, found the character sheet of a drow lady whose appearance I liked, and used by brother's scanner (who lived next to me at the time) to scan in the portrait. Then I spent a lot of time thinking up a name and a personality, which was a first for me. Not that she was terribly original at that point. She was, consciously, a female Drizzt (good aligned, but serious, drow ranger). But it was more than I'd done before. And thus Shir'le E. Illios, who would become a huge part of my introduction into serious roleplaying, was created.

The game itself was also absolutely wonderful. Not that my character much resembled her inspiration by the end. The game didn't support dual wielding so she never did that and she ended the game wearing the heaviest armour possible and shooting bows from a distance. But by that time I had fallen in love with the drow goddess Eilistraee and was kind of regretting her being a ranger. I wanted her to be a priestess of that deity. So when Baldur's Gate 2 rolled around I had a difficult decision to make. I either had to import her from the previous game and thus keep her as a ranger, or I had to create her as a new character but thus lose any connection with the previous game. I chose the former, on the surface becoming closer to Drizzt again because the game now supported dual wielding and you could even get a magic statue to summon a magic animal. But she was firmly changing in my mind and becoming someone else. Though the game's ranger base quest did end up becoming inspiration for part of her history.

BioWare announced Neverwinter Nights and I got involved with one of its communities, calling itself A Land Far Away, seeking to create the entirety of the Forgotten Realms world across numerous servers. I decided to join the community as Shir'le, as everyone seemed to play as their characters, whom I had fully redesigned as a priestess of Eilistraee at that point. A much softer and more innocent version of what she was in the games. And I'd written a short story to introduce her to the community. This community also had its section for forum roleplaying, which I'd never done at that point, but I gleefully joined. Thus, for the first time, I fully got to roleplay a character purely for roleplaying that character. I loved it.

Then I lost my job and found a new one in another country.

Those first few months were lonely. Not having a place of my own I had no access to Internet outside of at work, where I tended to stay much longer than I needed to just because of that. And whenever I went back to my room at the Bed & Breakfast that I was staying at I designed a website, on paper, that would later become Eilistraee.com. A place for those who love that drow goddess as much as I did. A place for forum roleplaying. A place to make friends.

And that I did. Once I got my own place, and Internet, I built my website and started my community, the "Chosen of Eilistraee". A new friend had given me an image of a dancing Eilistraee that I used as the title image and we were off. Though I decided to not make the community Neverwinter Nights specific, but rather a general site. This was probably a good thing since I didn't end up playing much Neverwinter Nights at first. It would take years after the official release before I really got into playing the game, primarily playing some of the excellent user-made modules (as well as the official Hordes of the Underdark expansion). At the time though I had gotten close to another new friend and together we decided to go on a sojourn of sorts across various MMOs. I had never played one of them and wondered what the fuss was about.

What followed was a couple of years roleplaying various different characters in various different MMOs. A tomboyish catgirl for City of Heroes, a content tailor for Star Wars Galaxies, a return of that Asian assassin for City of Villains, a psychotic witch elf leading up to Warhammer Online (I never really played the game itself), and even several months roleplaying a fairly regular lesbian woman in The Sims Online. After coming back to Neverwinter Nights I found a roleplaying server on which I roleplayed a drow shadow dancer. Then I found my way into Age of Conan, for which I created a spiritual prostitute, and later priestess of Derketo, to join the wonderful Dark Desires guild. Unlike other guilds they weren't focused on being a group of warriors, but on women banding together for protection, using their social and bedroom skills to get ahead rather than might of arms. That guild, to some degree, still lives on now with a Conan Exiles server (or rather two servers now) that I host.

In single player games too roleplaying became ever more important. Generally the combat mechanics and levelling mechanics and such don't interest me. And the stories that the developers try to tell in these games can be fun, but they always take away from this sense of really being a character in the world. To much story and it feels too much like you're not really in control. Like you don't really have any choice. A game like Skyrim is at its best when ignoring the main story, particularly if you use mods like the excellent Frostfall to make it so that you need to plan and consider, creating your own mini stories instead. Stories that might not be as good as the official ones on the surface, but stories that are much more personal and thus better.

Most "roleplaying games" really offer just glimpses of roleplaying. In multiplayer this is solved just by the players ignoring the story and telling their own, roleplaying with each other. In single player games the interest seems to be much more on telling their pre-baked stories with very little freedom to create your own outside of that. This seems a pity as there is so much potential. Potential that some games offer mere glimpses of. So my interest now is in trying to figure out what a game would look like that takes roleplaying first above all else.

What that means exactly I will look at in a future post.