(no subject)

[sideways]

2018 might not have been a terribly fic-cy year but I did find time amidst the study to participate in a surprising amount of collab writing - which is to say, I went back to my roleplay roots! Some panfandom (almost ten years to the dot since the last time I went down that path), which has proven exactly as challenging and addictive as I remember; some one-on-one with a friend over email, which has been sweet and fun and a terrible callout of my inability to write paragraphs quickly; and tabletop for the first time ever, through long-distance text over Discord with a group of Quixote's local friends. I still don't own any dice though :( We use a humble generator named Oddbod the Wodbot, all the better to curse it out directly.

Tabletop has been interesting. Good interesting, mind! My greatest hurdle is usually working out what I can and can't do, as it exists in that fuzzy zone between freeform storytelling where anything goes and a video game where all the possibilities are streamlined for an easy user experience. We're also playing one of the World of Darkness sets, Werewolf: the Forsaken, which comes with a veritable library's worth of deeply involved lore that I have still not quite managed to memorise. All the other players have participated in a W:tF campaign before so they know their werewolfery quite well, but at least they're kindly tolerant of me forgetting the rules of spirit communion and what a Ridden is, etc etc.

The campaign this time around is a noir murder mystery set in the French city of Nice in the year 2000, and my character is Tonka the back-alley doctor, who flunked her med degree but then discovered shortly afterwards that she was a werewolf so it arguably worked out in the wash. Notable achievements to date include:

• Accidentally kickstarting our first quest early through the simple action of having her check her phone, which netted us our pack totem (Bip the extremely adorable tech spirit) and an NPC with a sniper rifle after we rescued him;
• Pulling a knife out of the sniper rifle NPC's head, which hopefully makes up for kind of getting him stabbed with it in the first place when she knocked on the door of the place he was being held captive, don't look at me like that it was in-character;
• Succeeding a called shot roll and proceeding to straight-up hamstring an enemy with her teeth;
• Kidnapping an enemy for interrogation, who we all fondly called Ten for her placement in the enemy group until she died horribly in a manner mostly unrelated to the interrogation;
• Sneaking around a packmate's house and discovered a body buried in her basement along with an ominous message spraypainted on the wall;
• Now nervously existing on the shitlist of possibly the one pack member most likely to kill her and bury her body under a grand piano. Said packmate has even started to seed doubt amongst select others about Tonka's trustworthiness in order to have people on her side if things come to a head. I couldn't be more delighted.
• Has not yet had to confess to anyone that the reason she snuck around the house was that she recognised it, having been there some years before...

Comments

[hokuton_punch]

Ooh, that does sound like a lot of fun so far. :D I haven't done tabletop since college, and I had fun then but I've never had an RL friendsgroup big enough to run anything again... I should make some effort and see if there's a group I could join.

[sideways]

Doing it via long-distance is still very fun and a test of your improv skills - though I imagine you still need people in your same timezone, as the jokes about getting the group together are right on the nose, ahah. When sessions easily run into the seven hour mark it's a bit of a commitment.

What kind of tabletop did you play in college? c:

[hokuton_punch]

Long-distance could be a viable option... :\a Although yeah, timezones would be an issue. XD

Mostly a homebrew system, with my roommate as DM! So - I'm pretty much a total noob when it comes to any actual system, but at least I know the basics of how stats and dice work, so hopefully I wouldn't slow a more experienced group down too much.