(( an Out-of-character post
As far as I know, this is the site's first non-test blog post. Go me!
About the parentheses - I've decided to make this my WoW character's scrap notebook on the go. That means it'll usually be written in-character, or IC - and that means, whenever I put double-parentheses around stuff, that's an exception, so now I'm talking out-of-character, or OOC.
First a quick intro: I'm Nathan Hawks, one of the writers for OnlineRPGs.net. My username "Agonaga" is taken from my World of Warcraft character, Novice Agonaga Imperius. He is an undead priest who toils obsessively to lessen the plight and improve the conditions of those, like himself, who are Forsaken to unlife. I'll randomly alternate between out-of-character and in-character posts, in this blog, over time.
I've been roleplaying since that autumn afternoon when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was living in the billy hills with the rest of the hillbillies, when, suddenly, a friend whipped out those thin paperback Dungeons & Dragons handbooks. This was the 1990s, but the books were from a previous generation. They were color coded by character levels - different rulebooks for basic, advanced, and demigod play.
A few hours later, I was hooked. I got my first character killed almost instantly and rolled a new one, because death was permanent - and that was awesome. No free manz? I would have to play more carefully - choose to do what I'd do if I was really there, and didn't want to die.
We traded the player-vs-GM roles between the two of us and played for hours. We built up the kind of basic landscape and story you have time for, when plunging ahead one long evening down an imaginary road that gets built with each step the character takes. It might have been the first time I ever used the skills I now call "fiction-boxing." WHAM! A tragedy. WHAM! A mysterious stranger. WH- ooh, a feint! There is no villain to the north. WHAM! A reveal.
Nowadays as an adult, getting people around the same table with a pile of specialty rulebooks, and commit to sit in one place without interruptions, is harder to accomplish. ...but a computer desk in their own home, that's easy! So, after a couple years of flirting with online RPGs myself, I'm starting to role play again.
As they say, the rumors of roleplaying's death are exaggerated. I found a heavy RP guild on a WoW RP server and joined it this weekend. I'll unveil how things go with the guild over time, but so far we've had some good, public role playing scenes. The night I was interviewed, there were about 12 role-players all interacting near the bat handler at the Sepulcher. When my interview was finished, that one scene became three or four running at once, as another interview began and we non-officer characters started breaking into groups, doing meet-the-new-guy and what-have-you.
So that's me and my play style - first priority was roleplaying. I haven't done any instances yet, though I've been playing WoW for about a month. The idea of trashing a dungeon just because it's there, rarely sounds fun to me. But soon, the Novice Agonaga will infiltrate old Silverlaine Keep and, Dark Lady willing, he will drive the lunatic Arugal from Silverpine and be rid of his mad experiments.
Kicking ass in a boss fight is way more fun when someone - even if it's just someone fictional - actually cares.
))
Sunday, September 05, 2010
