It's now 12:29 in the morning and the "Big Week" is over.  I'm sitting at home in front of my own computer, at my own (messy) desk, writing a blog post (finally) because I've been wanting to write all week but never seemed to get the right chance to do it.

It was a long, but good week.  I met a lot of great people, walked around a gorgeous city, and learned a lot about the state of the web, the future of the web, and where I'm at in relation to all those things.  So far, I think I'm doing a pretty damned good job of staying on top of things.  Huzzah!

I also got a ridiculously cute pair of shoes and promptly gave myself blisters by wearing them everywhere.  So, now I have a pair of bloody feet, a pair of ridiculously cute shoes, and a pair of bandages.  All in all, I am satisfied with this turn of events, even if it did mean some damage control.  What can I say?  I'm okay with being a masochist as long as shoes are involved.

When I finally got home yesterday afternoon around one, I managed to stay awake long enough to go out to lunch with Nick and then make it to Changeling for my usual "Friday Night Fever".  I have to admit that with Kyle and I being completely exhausted, I wasn't expecting to get much accomplished or really enjoy the night.  But I was committed to making an appearance nonetheless.  The game is really important to me, and even moreso to Kyle, so showing my face (black circles under the eyes are easily covered by red face paint after all) was not a particularly difficult sacrifice.

Low and behold, however... the best game session that I have had in ages!  I beat the living daylights out of one of my motley members, got into a fight with my best friend, hunted down an oath-breaker, lectured a wayward wolf-girl, screamed at people for getting stabbed in my apartment, avoided a strip club (unfortunately), and basically had a grumpy red-faced bloodbrutey ogre of a time.  It was awesome!  Apparently character interraction at my best happens when I'm exhausted beyond all belief (but excited due to an awesomesauce week full of the aforementioned great things that happened).

So... kudos for Web Directions North.  Somehow not only did it spruce up my work life, but also made gaming this week a hell of an awesome time.  I can't wait to see what happens next. 

Life has been pretty hectic lately.  With the holiday season, working my two jobs, snow and now flooding, plus getting sick and now having Nick be sick... when I haven't been wallowing on the couch in blatant boredom watching obnoxious daytime television and drinking tons of OJ, I've been relatively inclined to pull my hair out.  Thank god the holiday seasons are over, eh?

That's not to say I don't love Christmas, because I really do.  My family came up to visit and despite the obnoxious setbacks that the snow brought, a white Christmas was quite pleasant all around.  Unfortunately, due to the weather, I didn't get to spend nearly as much time with my friends as I wanted to.

Any gaming that requires an actual social group also tends to grind to a halt during December and sometimes early January.  The two tabletop games I was playing (Hunter and Scion, if you've forgotten) abruptly stopped at the end of November, and Exalted had ground to a halt at the beginning of the month.  The Friday night LARP, Changeling, took a three week hiatus due to parties and the holidays themselves.  I missed more than that merely from being sick and having to go to my sister's wedding.

That said, one of the other distracting things for social gamers that happened back in November was the release of Wrath of the Lich King for World of Warcraft.  I haven't really talked about it much, and I'm not going to be talking about it today, I'm afraid.  I'll go into a rambling speel about the glories of my Death Knight some other day for your entertainment.  Or my entertainment.  One of the two.

With all my face-to-face social gaming being on the down low, I've had some things to consider.  Melbonia and I had a fairly long conversation about tabletop gaming, LARPing, and what we are looking to get out of such.  We've been a bit frustrated with our LARP lately due to the fact that some of the players have had some interesting ideas on what to do.  The plot has been going willy-nilly with people doing their own weird wacky things, and there hasn't been much of a grand over-arching storyline to keep us interested in the game.  It's been very Changeling the Dreaming instead of Changeling the Lost.  We would both like a more serious plot.

Luckily, when we both re-entered the gaming world with the New Year, we saw that some things were being changed and we definitely started enjoying the game more.  Nick and Kyle do a great job running it, and they work hard to make sure that everyone has fun.  It would be nicer if all our ideas of "fun" were the same, but people are never going to have all the same opinions after all.  That's what makes us unique.

We also found that our tabletop gaming had become quite focused on stats and combat rather than on story.  One of the main reasons that I roleplay is because I want to tell a good story and be part of a good story.  In fact, I would say that is the main reason that I roleplay.  It's not the say that our Exalted, Hunter, or Scion games didn't have good stories.  They did.  But there was also a lot of focus on the combat angle that took away from a lot of the actual story aspect.  Plenty of people enjoy dungeon crawling, and I can't say that I haven't had my moments of kitchen raiding in an old castle, myself.  At the same time, though, it's hard to feel epic like Tolkien, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, or a lot of those other fantastic fantasy authors when you feel like all you're doing is counting squares and stats rather than enjoying the story.

I know it's funny to say that, since the games we've been playing are done by White Wolf, which is a very heavy story-based system.  Unlike, say, DND which is definitely more dungeon crawling and combat oriented.  But, Exalted and Scion are both very combat oriented games in their own rights, despite having fantastic worlds to tell stories in, and Hunter is part of our own world, albeit much darker, and since we were going for a more "Supernatural" theme with the game, it had a lot of twists and turns that were more episodic than actual epic story.

The four of us sat down and had a long, deep conversation about roleplaying and what we want in response to Melbonia and my first discussion about it.  For me, rp is sort of like a drug.  I really can't live without my "stories" just like some people can't live without their television "stories".  To each their own, right?

So, we decided to do something that was a bit ironic and see if we could play in an epic fantasy game that Kyle would run in his own world based on the d20 system.  We're even going to attempt DND 4th Edition, which I have to admit I'm a bit worried about due to the fact that I haven't even really looked at the books let alone the game in a few years now.  I definitely want to divulge some of the details of Kyle's world, but I should probably get permission before telling about it.

The strange thing is (okay, maybe not too strange), I'm really excited!  I'm even going to be playing a class type that I've never enjoyed or been too interested in the past (priest), but I think I have a solid concept and I'm really looking forward to how it plays out.  Melbonia has a great concept as well, and Nick is still working on his, but I think he's got something down, too.

I'm hoping this will inspire some stories and art, and I'll definitely be giving you a first look at DND 4th Edition from my perspective.

Who'd have thought I'd ever go back to DND?

Aside from some of my more obvious issues, schizophrenia of characterization is something that I struggle with. Part of the problem is that I have a writer's brain. I am forever coming up with new storybook situations, new scenes out of seemingly random occurences, new characters to interact in them. Part of it is that I have the attention span of a paramecium. Most of it is that I just can't (won't) stop. This explains my total obsession with roleplaying games.

I started roleplaying when I was eleven. Wait, twelve. No... thirt--I was way too young to be roleplaying, is what I was. I never learned in the lap of family or friends like our Melbonia. Being somewhat of a geek even back then, I spent too much time on the computer playing quality games and fell into an online freeform roleplaying chronicle at a place called "The Chathouse", somewhere in the Flip Side. I began life as a lowly peasant selkie -- what? like you've never! -- whose name was directly ripped off of the first single-title romance book I ever read. Again, I repeat, like you've never! Within the space of five years' dedicated roleplay, I'd been blood-bound to a High Queen, made her Regent, cast as the Archmage of Healing in a Wizard's Tower, turned down a King (laughed in his face, actually), lost two lovers, gone mad with grief and become the crazy witch on the deserted island, found and returned again, and was the friend and "mother" to two beautiful dragons.

I was sixteen, if my math-to-school-grade is right, when the whole story ended -- as it always does -- in a cacophany of drama and out of character mayhem.Some people become brilliant doctors by this age. I had a complete, if imaginary, life wrapped up in the space of five years. And they ask if roleplaying is addicting?

I still remember a time when my mother and I shared a bedroom in a rented floor of a Virginia house. I had a habit of operating on precious little sleep -- I'd kill for that ability now -- and I would stay up late, clickety-clacking on the keys as mom tried to slip a few feet away. During one particular eventful night, I warned my mother ahead of time (quite seriously!) that there was a war brewing between kingdoms, and I had to be at the council to make sure it didn't happen. She laughed, but she let me stay up with no argument that time. It was about 3:30 in the morning that my clattering woke her up, and as she rolled over with a muttered curse/question, I cheerfully whispered, "It's okay, mom, I saved the kingdom from war!"

She mumbled something about, "Oh, that's good," before zonking out again, while I tried to make sure not to wake her again.

This fever in me has never really died. It's abated, with time and life, and it has occasionally gone dormant.  The older I've gotten, the more jaded I've become, until I forget sometimes that a real story is told by many people, and there are never really winners in a game of fantasy. Characters have sprung up, sometimes fully formed from the head of some muse-like goddess, and sometimes only half a thought waiting patiently for flesh and bone.

I branched out from freeform (and shudder, now, to think that I spent so long doing it), and attempted high school Dungeons and Dragons. At this point, I think they were still calling themselves "Advanced". I had no idea at the time that this was an indication of where my math skills needed to be.  From these fledgling table-top days (I played a half-elf bard because who hasn't?), I started forum-RPing again (because I'm an effing glutton for it, and to make it even more hilarious, it was fan-fiction), and then moved into MU*ing on ASCII text-based games. My husband and I have fond memories of sharing our single 1-gig computer, me curled up on the chair and him perched on the back behind it. We'd alt-tab between screens, and I'd write what he said for his character. It was an innocent, fresh enjoyment kind of time. From MU*s, to LARPing, and from LARPing to MMORPGs. Not necessarily in this specific order.

For that matter, I still maintain the latter two, which doesn't help my multiple-character disorder, either.

To date, I maintain five characters, one of which hasn't started yet. This is extremely paired down from the scads and scads I had going on any number of games and events. There was a point in my life when I had two forum/mailing list roleplay games, three characters on a single MU*, one on another, staffed all of the above, two LARP characters (depending on what was running at the local U.), and whatever MMO I was playing at the time, with however many character slots they give you.

Un. Healthy.

I'm proud of myself for paring down, even if I swap them out for new faces more times than anybody really likes. But I also can't help but wonder what it is about making characters that seems so much more interesting than long-term playing. I haven't managed to play a single character for longer than six months since my MU* days. Costuming, decriptive writing, finding new quirks, new thoughts, new dreams, is just as fascinating, if not more so, and may explain why I keep trying to be a writer. Call me legion, says the title of this post, for we are many, and it has nothing to do with the Biblical reference. Except, uh, it's a quote. But I'm not talking about the demons in my head -- those have their own place to frolic. This is character, pure and simple, and I'll wager a plate of my killer french toast that The Girls know exactly what I'm talking about.

Doncha, girls?

(An incidental note: I just checked up on my ol' friend The Chathouse, and wouldn't you know it? Half of it is still there. The Flip Side is as empty as the ghost town I know it is, but I stare at that god-awful screen and see the lists filled to the brim. Edain, my Ard Rhigan, wherever you are, this one's for you.)