One of the things I love about being a writer is experiencing the worlds that other people create.  You can do this in many ways, but one of my favorite ways is through role-playing games (RPG’s). If you’ve never played one before, check out Meetup.com and see if there are people playing in your area that you can get involved in.  Or, you can just wait until next year and attend the 2013 Free RPG Day.

I attended this year’s event at a local gaming store called The Game Keep in Hermitage, TN and met up with some members of the Nashville RPG Gamers group.

Rule #1 to RPG’ing – if you’re going to have fun with the game, surround yourself with fun people.

The group was very well organized, planning on having five different games running in 2 hour slots from the opening of the door to when the store closed.  I was very apprehensive walking into a new group, but I was immediately swept up into a game and started to make friends.  Everyone was very friendly and enjoyable to play with.

The first game was a NeoExodus Pathfinder Adventure by LPJ Design.  I’ve never played in this world, but it was easy to see how the characters were created with the pre-generated characters that were available.  Now, the group spent the first hour of the game chit chatting, building characterization and just having fun, but the second half was straight adventure.  The premise had us six adventures heading down a river where we got attacked by three bad guys and their boss – or that’s really how far we got anyway.

The characters that were generated for the world were pretty complete.  You had your standard stats which let you know how graceful, smart and charming that you are – but the sheets also included a brief history of the character’s home world, their caste and position in it, and even a bit on the religion that they followed (or in my character’s case, pretended to follow).  When playing on the spot, I felt it was an amazing way to give the player a tiny piece of the history that they can build off of.

I also liked how you didn’t have the normal “types” of races in this game.  There were humanoids, but we also had a brain-eating creature, a mutated ape, a metal man, and in our journey we talked to scorpion people.  There is a lot of creativity in this just in the world and the character building aspects that I can’t wait to get my hands on a purchasable module of this game.  Alas I missed getting myself a free copy.

The second game was from the Castles & Crusades adventure series from Troll Lord Games.  Again, another series I never played in, but was equally amused at the module this game presented.  The pre-generated character didn’t have as much back-story as the first game, but it gave a good sense on the personality that they created for this character.  We were back to the normal race types you find the the standard D&D type worlds, but the game left for a lot of character role-playing as opposed to the hack-and-slash type battles.  I love these types of games because I’m a big character RP’er, and getting to solve the adventures with our wits as opposed to our swords makes for a better adventure.  Also, in homage to Dorkness Rising, I did get to seduce one of my attackers.  Just because I could.

I had to leave early, or I would have joined a third game – Conspiracy X – from Eden Studios.  I did get to grab a sample kit though, and will try to run the adventure with my little group of RP friends on another day.  This one looks like a mix between Men In Black and your typical government coverup gone wrong mission movie.  I’ll report back more on this when I get to play it.

For me, playing an RPG is a great way to learn about character building.  It allows you to have both the good and the bad in each character.  I’ll admit that I sometimes will use the old D&D style of rolling a character to create the minor characters in my fantasy novels as a base to allow them to start growing into who they will eventually be.  My soon to be released novella, A Fine Line: Herrick’s Tale, in fact, has a few of those in there.

If you really want to experience true character building that you can see, just go to one game and try it out.  Just remember not to get too sucked in, or you will lose whatever writing time you may have left in your day!