Lolplaying
Feb. 5th, 2011 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mistersandmanTwo posts in one day. How I suffer for my own self-imposed schedule, but it's better than falling behind!
Woke up, derped around on Metroid Prime (which is such a good game that it's criminal I didn't play it nine years ago), participated in a psychology experiment. I don't have a job right now, so basically my only source of income is doing psychology experiments. I'm hoping to land a $150 isolation study soon, but in the meantime I can't say no to $8 for analyzing Hugo Chavez's body language, which is what I was tasked today.
After that, it was time for D&D!!
Man, so cool. All of the wooden figurines and tiles you see above were made by one of our party members. He's a fantastic artist and I'm going to use this opportunity to plug his comic. I've been playing with this group for two semesters now and it's been a great time, a great time that I will not bother telling you very much about. As I've discovered talking to other D&D players, no matter how interesting you think your tabletop escapades are, when experienced second-hand they are invariably dull.
Suffice to say: We play in a world where things are generally pretty awful! Evil sorcerer-kings rule over caste societies that operate on the misery of a large slave population. Abuse of magic has led to massive deforestation. I play a Templar, a servant of one of the aforementioned evil kings who was recently deposed in a slave rebellion. I want to restore "order" to my city and to that end I have recruited my slave-driver and childhood friend (who is also half-dragon!), an overgrown sentient mantis nomad from the wasteland, and a former tradeprince who seeks to restore his title and become fabulously wealthy. We used to travel with an elf peasant monk with psychic powers, but we murdered him because he rightly believed we were a gang of thugs and a blight upon an already-blighted land. In the words of Lenin, we are too rude.
I don't know what it says about me that my character, Lord Eridan "The Shotgun" Vantas is a racist fanatic who wants to restore/create an oppressive regime. Character development is a tricky thing to pull off in a roleplaying game. If anything, I feel like characters become less nuanced as time goes by. It's just easier to take certain traits such as fanatic nationalism or total ruthlessness and exaggerate them, rather than explore them.
Which isn't to say there hasn't been any development at all. I'm not very good at D&D, which means that poor Vantas has had to learn humility the hard way: lots and lots of death. I think I've died in the majority of the sessions that we've played. Similarly, working with people of different races and political ideologies has forced him to be more tactful, if not tolerant.
At the end of the day, it comes down to this: As cool as it would be to put my exiled noble through a gut-wrenching redemptive character arc, it's much more fun to play a cunning bastard who wants to rule the world with an iron, yet posh, fist.
Woke up, derped around on Metroid Prime (which is such a good game that it's criminal I didn't play it nine years ago), participated in a psychology experiment. I don't have a job right now, so basically my only source of income is doing psychology experiments. I'm hoping to land a $150 isolation study soon, but in the meantime I can't say no to $8 for analyzing Hugo Chavez's body language, which is what I was tasked today.
After that, it was time for D&D!!
Man, so cool. All of the wooden figurines and tiles you see above were made by one of our party members. He's a fantastic artist and I'm going to use this opportunity to plug his comic. I've been playing with this group for two semesters now and it's been a great time, a great time that I will not bother telling you very much about. As I've discovered talking to other D&D players, no matter how interesting you think your tabletop escapades are, when experienced second-hand they are invariably dull.
Suffice to say: We play in a world where things are generally pretty awful! Evil sorcerer-kings rule over caste societies that operate on the misery of a large slave population. Abuse of magic has led to massive deforestation. I play a Templar, a servant of one of the aforementioned evil kings who was recently deposed in a slave rebellion. I want to restore "order" to my city and to that end I have recruited my slave-driver and childhood friend (who is also half-dragon!), an overgrown sentient mantis nomad from the wasteland, and a former tradeprince who seeks to restore his title and become fabulously wealthy. We used to travel with an elf peasant monk with psychic powers, but we murdered him because he rightly believed we were a gang of thugs and a blight upon an already-blighted land. In the words of Lenin, we are too rude.
I don't know what it says about me that my character, Lord Eridan "The Shotgun" Vantas is a racist fanatic who wants to restore/create an oppressive regime. Character development is a tricky thing to pull off in a roleplaying game. If anything, I feel like characters become less nuanced as time goes by. It's just easier to take certain traits such as fanatic nationalism or total ruthlessness and exaggerate them, rather than explore them.
Which isn't to say there hasn't been any development at all. I'm not very good at D&D, which means that poor Vantas has had to learn humility the hard way: lots and lots of death. I think I've died in the majority of the sessions that we've played. Similarly, working with people of different races and political ideologies has forced him to be more tactful, if not tolerant.
At the end of the day, it comes down to this: As cool as it would be to put my exiled noble through a gut-wrenching redemptive character arc, it's much more fun to play a cunning bastard who wants to rule the world with an iron, yet posh, fist.
