Online Role Playing - Or - I Hit It With My Axe

Besides the fact that the title of this blog is a reference to an online video series that chronicles the ongoing adventures of a group of porn stars attempting (and succeeding quite awesomely) to play D&D, it also references something that my friends and I do quite often...well...almost. It references a new way to do something that we do multiple times per week. I am, of course, talking about role playing. "Duh" I hear you cry, "You called it Online Role Playing for a reason, I assumed." Well you can take your attitude, mister smarty pants, and leave! The rest of you fine, glorious, and slightly moist people can stick around and listen to me espouse the virtues of this activity!

Role playing is, at the heart of it, very very much like acting. Only, without the script. Improv! Role playing is, at the heart of it, very very much like improv. You have a character who you embody - that character has a backstory, a personality, and so forth (much like Holtarrion in the journal I have been keeping - Yes, yes, I did only start doing that last week, but the person who pointed that out can join their friend in the hallway, thank you very much - I will see you both after the class has finished) and you create their future by interacting with other players or non-player characters. In the case of more traditional role playing games, the success or failure of your actions is determined not by how well you can play the character, but instead by a series of dice rolls (it's just like Maths: The Game, I love it!) Online role playing, however (as well as the offline free form varieties, like the Murder Mystery party I held a while back) rely solely upon your ability to pretend, to immerse yourself in the other world, and to play nicely with others (something those two in the hallway just don't seem to understand, apparently.)

For the purposes of keeping everything nice and together, Laura (who I haven't really mentioned in this blog, but who will be cropping up more and more frequently, I imagine) has created a Facebook group which houses several posts, each of which represents an area in the fictional world. To interact with the world, you simply post your actions as a comment on the thread, and everybody kind of feeds off what you do. This, of course, means that you don't have to have anybody else online with you for your to participate - though in this situation you might be waiting for anywhere up to a couple of hours before somebody responds to you, it means that you don't have to worry about everybody being together at once.

The story we have going at the moment is, brilliantly enough, being written by everybody as we go along. There is no over-arching plot, there are no goals that we have to achieve, there isn't any big bad who is going to come and slaughter us if we don't go training. We do what we want. We write how we want. We make it up as we go along. Really, the only rule with this is that as long as you respect the other participants, and as long as you respect established continuity (once something has happened it can't unhappen...) then you're fine. It's brilliant.

So I guess then, that you're wondering the big question of "Why?" (and it's certainly not the first time I've had that question asked in my classroom, I'll tell you!) Well besides the fact that it's fun, and that it exercises your creative muscles, it's a pretty cool social activity. I mean, sure you're not technically interacting with other people as yourself, but you are playing a game with them, and games are one of the most social activities out there.