Chat's come and chat's go...

Some people game online. Some sit around tables and game with their friends. Some people do both. Why? What the hell is going on with the hobby that it has to happen online?

Well, first, I have a theory. it's an unfounded theory, but one I have developed over the years from first hand observation and an underlying pattern that seems to repeat itself over and over.  This is the part where I piss off a few people. Hate me, please do, because I know some of you will anyway.

First, there's about, oh, 3 kinds of players out there. I mean, there's a LOT of ways to classify people and stick them into niches and be all prejudiced about personality, we could break this down into a million little microcosms but I haven't got the time or the patience for that kind of stupidity, I'm not a psychologist and I don't make money for this.

1. The average player. By average I don't mean good or bad or the person who never has an issue, just, this person is not out to take a great big steaming shit on the game for their own self edification. They just want to play.  A good 90% of the players out there fall into this category, they’re well adjusted, and they occasionally get upset but they have far more fun than they let the game irritate them or set out to irritate others.  Yeah yeah yeah, if you read my blog you know I’ve said before that like 99% of the players online are ass hats, that’s really not true – but the few problem children out there REALLY have an impact greater than they should because they drive off good players, monopolize the storyteller’s time, and wind up creating an impact disproportionate with what they should be able to affect.

2. The ass hole. This player is purely out there to screw up the game for anyone and everyone. Maybe it's selfish, maybe it's an impulse, maybe they really do get their jollies that way, maybe mommy and daddy just didn't give them enough attention as kids, maybe nothing lives up to their own inner ideas of cool, but this prick is out to ruin the game as much as possible, period. This is the kind of douche that would actually do something bad enough to get arrested for breaking a cyber-bullying law, as stupid as THOSE are.  Avoid them, they’ll get themselves run off from any good game site in short order.

3. The head case.  This player, ohhhh friends and neighbors, this player really is the cream of the fucked up crop. They are out there, with self-loathing and esteem issues and Oedipal complexes and an utter disregard for common sense and decorum and truly troglodyte thoughts. This player gets banned from every chat they TRY to get into until they find a repugnant, poorly run site somewhere that lets them stay and play because they suck the admin's e-peen. Other sites just kick them out, over and over and over. These players are able to pare down a healthy chat in a matter of days through sheer force of emo. (Luke! Use the Emo!)

The problems with online games come around because admins come from those same three groups of people.

So you have admins - the people who run chat sites (and who are usually the people skilled enough in writing code in the various languages that are needed to run a site) that are your everyday people, who are utter ass holes, and who are as crazy as Charles Manson eating froot loops on your front porch. Sometimes all three in one chat! What this means is that chats are transient places that can and do change with the blowing of the wind.  Not ALL chat’s, but enough of them that the average online player is usually leery of any new chat for a few days if not weeks until they figure out which way the internet wind blows.  The net result is most chats have a shelf life of about 3 years.  This is kind of odd, except, it turns out that online that's about how long it takes people to lose it and start shrieking like banshee's at people they couldn't stand from day one but tolerated for some stupid fucked up reason until they lost it and the game fell apart because the admin was a complete douche, the staff was corrupt, or in some cases the staff just got tired of being constantly trolled and hassled by fuck-tards with nothing better to do than bitch and moan that the chat was not perfect by their particular standards. 

So players - of all kinds - move. They migrate to and from sites as the old chats crash and burn and new ones emerge with the goal of being better somehow.

And let’s not forget those bastions of decorum and self-righteous egotistical narcissism!  The review forum!

These have taken on many forms over the years: IconsInTheFoyer.com, TheGrandNexus.com, and the current cesspool RPGSoapBox.net – which I will lovingly refer to as RPGShitBox.  Because it’s a big box of shit.  Why do I say that?

Well, even if I didn’t get into the jaded, sordid love trapezoids and dodecahedrons that apparently shaped this lovely site on the interwebs, even if I didn’t delve into the lack of any guidance and the corrupt antics of the site, even if I didn’t go into the background antics that shaped this troll’s den (because frankly allllll of those things are important too, but pale in comparison to one very important fact about this place anyway) – even if we ignore all of that there’s one very important part about this site that belies the uselessness and angst-ridden inappropriateness of it: the people reviewing ON RPGShitBox.  The reason I bring this up is simple: no one died and elected these douche bags the authority on what a good game is.  In fact 99% of the people posting on RPGShitBox:

1. Don’t play in the games they talk smack about because they are such bad players they’ve been ejected or every other player ignored them until they got bored and left

2. Have a self-righteous sense of entitlement: by god, they know what a game should be like!  And yet, every time they start to run one they commit worse acts of corruption than the sites they denigrate and wind up fired quick, fast, and in a hurry.

3. Aren’t at all subjective – we’re talking about people here who have huge personal axes to grind.  There’s no paid help whose job is to go out and review chat sites with a *neutral* basis.  Seriously, if Consumer Reports just solicited negative feedback from people who had products from the various car manufacturers out there and didn’t have anyone neutral drive a single vehicle, then we’d believe that no car produced anywhere by any manufacturer was anything but utter automotive SHIT. 

Think about it: how the hell could a site that let’s anyone post and paint things in ANY light they wanted be a neutral review site?  There’s been study after study about this very topic done and the reality is that happy customers don’t gush nearly as often as unhappy customers pontificate: and all RPGShitBOx and its predecessor sites do is give players who got their asses spanked a place to go and spout off bullshit.  So: to you, my fledgling player, I urge you… ignore RPGShitBox like it doesn’t exist.  I tell you this openly because RPGShitBox is a far bigger detriment and blight on our online hobby than it could ever be a benefit – the sole positive use for it is to know where games *are* occurring.  In fact, if you want to benchmark a game site based on RPGShitBox?  Watch to see who has the highest NEGATIVE traffic – it invariably means the staff is pretty good and weeding out the players who will piss you off in a hurry and thus, they’re bitching up a blue streak.

Fuck those fucking fucks.

The Fireman’s Guide to what Role Playing is...

So by now, if you are reading my blog and wondering what the hell I am going on about and acting like such a sanctimonious bastard, you are either one of the people for whom role playing is a hobby, or you are asking yourself if I have lost my fucking mind.

Let me explain what the gist of role playing is in the first place, because frankly a lot of people out there playing these games in the first place don’t have the foggiest idea and wouldn’t know truth from imaginary if Harry Potter himself was eating fruit loops on their front porch. I am like a lot of folks who role play in that I started a long time ago, playing D&D when I was a kid almost 30 years ago in fact. Stop with the old-fart comments, don’t make me whack you with my cane bitches. All jests about age and geriatrics aside, gaming has been around for a looong time.

The story goes that back in the late 60’s / early 70’s a game of Risk was run in which the host told his players (I do believe it was St. Gygax who did this, but don’t quote me…) that they could attempt “back room” deals and politics. So the game, the host felt, was a horrible failure because they didn’t finish, but his guests, oh honey, they had a blast! They conned and connived, made back room deals, held coups and double crossed each other and alllll those things. They “took on” the role of world leaders and did unscripted, unscrupulous, unplanned things that added a deep human dimension to a simple game of risk. This led to some ideas and inspirations and eventually D&D grew out of that whole idea. That there was more to games than just games, that you could add in human depth and make it far more intriguing.

Today we have those whole cottage industry making billions of dollars a year off people who want to escape their dreary, boring, craptastic lives. Why? Because there’s a whole shitload of people out there who are sad and never do a fucking thing worthy of being called adventure, but they want to. And on the flipside of the coin there’s a shit load of people out there who bust their ass in this shitty economy and just want some place that they can go and have a little high fantasy that doesn’t involve a cash register or a stupid uniform or some ass hole’s attitude while you’re trying to do your job for low wages. I fall into the “I’m just bored and gaming out of habit” category myself, I doubt I’ll walk away any time soon because frankly, I am amused by idiots and idiocy and their attempts to impose upon me their ideals of cool or acceptable. It’s like watching ants run up an elephants leg with rape on their little ant minds. To those players I say: sorry kids, you’re not going to change ME based on an online game and if you’re actually trying to actively do so, you’re a douche.

So role playing is a game, yes, much like risk or monopoly, only there’s no board, no pieces, and no set “goal” in most cases… with a few notable exceptions (Like Paranoia). You assume the role of a created person, and basically pretend to be someone who’s more bad ass than you are yourself for a short time. All is well with the world, right? Seems like it would be something hard to mess up, right? Wrong. The problem is that any time you get two people together, no matter how mellow, there’s going to be SOMETHING that they can’t agree on. Now, I know you’re saying, “Gee, you haven’t told us much about what role playing IS?” No, I have… Role Playing is PLAYING a ROLE. Actually making it your own. Its equal parts acting and storytelling.

Well, the problem here is that whether you are playing in a game that takes place in a gothic horror now, a distant mystical past, or a futuristic fantasy in space, there’s always some jack ass who just can’t play and be cool with everyone else playing. There is always some water head who has to gripe because his PC isn’t the most specialist or who demands the storytellers time and attention or who wants to be all emo and the center of a galaxy (and game) wide attempt to cheer him up or even just wants to fuck everything in sight that’s got a pulse (pulse is even optional in some cases…). Yep, it gets political. Frankly, I don’t really CARE about someone who’s PC is just a bad idea or who wants to cyber their way into hairy palmed blindness… it’s the social rejects who can’t just be mellow and let others have their fun that I can’t stand. Who cares if Bob the guy from Mud Lick, Kentucky has a piss-poor character? No one is demanding you play with him, leave him be and worry about your own shit. Can’t do that? Then you’re the kind of guy who could fuck up a blow job and I don’t mind it if I offend you by saying so.

The bottom line is that there is almost nothing at stake, people role play and they are so damn judgemental and nasty and political precisely because the stakes are so SMALL. It’s no different than kids playing video games – the price tag is just different and we prefer to interact more dynamically.

Now, here’s the secret: if you want to be a good role player, you have to be good at telling a story. Not necessarily for others, but you have to be good at telling YOUR story… and by YOUR story I don’t mean you personally, I mean, whatever the story is you are trying to tell. Not necessarily every story starts off with a definite ending, there’s nothing wrong with it evolving as it goes along, and there’s no problem if you wander hither and yon while you tell it, but you gotta tell it well. A poorly defined and poorly told story, one where you don’t know who the hell the hero is or what he’s about, goes down about like drinking a nice tall glass of puree’d fish guts in a warm urine sauce. At least take the time to figure out what kind of person you’re going to portray.

And while we’re at it, one last tip: No one likes and ass hole. This goes for characters as well as people, so if your character is an ass hole, expect that no one at all is going to want to hang out with him. You know, when you walk into work and the boss gives you a shit job just because he can and he has power over you? The nazi bitch who runs the office like it’s her own personal little corner of hell over which to hoard? The prick body builder who gave you the atomic wedgie in 10th grade? No body liked them because they. Are. Ass holes. So if you want to have fun and not get avoided like mormon missionaries in a Southern Baptist neighborhood, or worse yet, get curb stomped like mormon missionaries in Kabul, then do us alllll a favor and don’t be an ass hole and don’t PLAY an ass hole.

The Fireman’s Guide to Different Online Games

The Fireman’s Guide to Different Online Games
OR
Just How Many Different Kinds of Idiots ARE Out There on the Internet?

Ahhh, online gaming. Most of us started out in a pencil-and-paper game setting. We were he geeks and not-so-much geeks sitting around the dining room table with a copy of the Players Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide back when AD&D was the biggest game in town and White Wolf was not yet a wet stain in someone’s shorts and companies like TSR and West End Games and FASA owned the industry. We played games like Mechwarrior and its horrendous system and Twilight 2000 and RIFTS with their ungodly long and involved character creation process and maybe even a few “cool” games like Cyberpunk (or it’s slightly more Tolkien-meets-TRON cousin Shadowrun).

If you are reading this and you don’t know what half of what I just said means, then all I can say is you need to make a trip to the nearest gaming store that sells used books and skip right on past the shiny new Saga Edition Star Wars rules and go find a copy of the original West End version of the game. Then, prepare to ask yourself “What were THOSE crack-babies THINKING?!?”

So, here’s a run down:

Dungeons and Dragons. The game that started it all. The original system was written by St. Gygax… er… I mean Gary Gygax as far back as the 1970’s and was around in one iteration or another up until Wizards of the coast bought the rights from TSR and updated it to the D20 system, or D&D 3rd edition… and the open source license. This brought about a billion minor companies into the mix as they could all produce and sell products that were compatible with D&D. Some companies like Green Ronin or Privateer Press put out some damn fine game material, some others flat sucked the root. The problem in the end is that most people playing D&D online are either 1. Playing in an MMO and not really role playing, or 2. They are sequestered quietly away and playing a more or less private game. There are some large D20 games out there but when someone wants in you have to ask if they want to play the same kind of game you do or incorporate all of the WEIRD shit that’s been put out over the years.

Rifts. I have yet to see a Rifts game online. I have stumbled across hints of them, but they have never been active, I encourage anyone reading this who is aware of one to drop a comment bomb on this blog and let us know, or even better, let us know what it was like. Rifts has great art and an interesting back story, but the system is only just slightly less complicated than the mathematics involved in Quantum physics or Chinese arithmetic. Rifts is set about a thousand years in the future and it’s interesting if you can find a game that focuses on the story and the setting and themes instead of the stats and numbers.

Star Wars. Sometimes you find this in D20 as it was published for quite a few years using a system very close to that for 3rd edition and 3.5 edition D&D. Sometimes you find the old West End Games system, which worked but was… cumbersome. Sometimes you find a system-less site that claims to be role playing but is really more like a group of Star Wars geeks sitting around writing fan fiction and masturbating vicariously. It’s odd but I have seen very few places that produce as much drivel as a bad Star Wars fan site and also very few places that produce such clever and well made fan material. Star Wars is cool, but man, it collects a VERY wide range of fans. If you don’t know what Star Wars is about I want you to go rent Episode iV, A New Hope, and don’t come up for air until you’ve seen it.

White-Wolf. Not a single game but a whole SLEW of games in two different catagories and where I spend a lot of my time, it includes:

OLD World of Darkness. The game that made role playing cool again was Vampire: The Masquerade. How violent, how goth, how horrific and dark… it was like distilled cool. The thing about these games was that they had tie in, one game sometimes kissed the next, but they all tied into each other and the real world around us in metaphysical and social and historical sense. The system wasn’t as refined as it would become with the new World of Darkness, but god the setting and metaplot and history included god and the devil, angels and demons, vampires and werewolves and mages and fae and alllll manner of things.

NEW World of Darkness. Okay, this is where the happy boat stops and I get off because frankly my biggest gripe about the old World of Darkness was the system, in the new game they tossed out everything that was cool and worked and fixed the system but broke every other fucking thing. I won’t go into details (in THIS blog post anyway…) but I will say this: the new changeling game is the best of the new stuff and the only one I REALLY like.

The World of Darkness games both boil down to this: they are both about playing anti-heroes. The eldritch magi, the brutal werewolf, the monstrous vampire, the nightmare fairy. Fun, but atypical, and set in the world just outside your window (only with mages and werewolves and vampires, oh my!).

There are, of course, other games out there on the internet. Now, for those of you who are about to utter the words “Final Fantasy” or “Second Life” don’t even think about it. ROLE PLAYING means you assume the role, not you watch a scripted cinematic. Making a yes or no or an either / or decision by hitting A or B on a pad or clicking with a mouse on options is NOT role playing. Role playing was once argued to me to be Magic the Gathering… yes, that stupid fucking card game that I swear is packaged with heroine, was presented to me as role playing. I laughed so hard I like to piss myself.

ROLE PLAYING means you PLAY the role, you make ALL the choices, create the dialog, the characters temperament, choose the paths to take, and so on. No video game is role playing, what you have is video games where you ASSUME a role as presented and then follow a linear path. Don’t believe me? Show me in a final fantasy game where you can deviate from the script? And I don’t mean make a choice, I mean, take up knitting in the game or perhaps rape the annoying female lead. For the record, I don’t recommend rape EVER, but it illustrates the point that in the game you can’t deviate from what’s programmed. That’s not role playing. Also for the record, if someone tried to rape in a game I was running they would probably leave my house via the front door at roughly the speed of my boot in their ass.

So, that brings us to methodology. There’s basically three ways most people who play online play: in chat, by email, and by forum. Playing by email means you sign onto a mailing list. You receive email at whatever address you signed up with containing information, you reply. I personally don’t think this is worth a damn as a viable role playing experience, but you can write your fan-fiction and so on using this avenue with a framework. It also can be easier to see what’s going on before you leap in. If the game looks like it’s being run by a retarded monkey, then you can bow out before you even get started.

Playing by forum means that there is a message board somewhere. You log in and everything happens on message threads that you follow and post to. Not the most interactive, but once more, you can usually get a feel for how things are run before you leap in. Only real difference between this and email groups is that with an email based game you don’t have to visit the site.

The final means is by chat. This is by far the most interactive and has the longest learning curve. The upside is that in a chat you can interact real-time, the downside is that until you actually catch a story teller and get involved, you won’t know if the game is run well or if it’s the mind child of a brainless nitwit, or worst of all, a nightmare given semi-literate form by someone who’s got the coping and interpersonal skills of a rapid Chihuahua. These can run from amateur in layout to complex and professional, but ultimately they are run by volunteers and as such the value and entertainment factor of an online game can vary widely and how well laid out the sites themselves are have NOTHING to do with how well the games run. Some of the lousiest role playing I’ve had has been on some of the best administered and layed out sites, and some of the most fun has been on barely-there bare bones sites with only the most minimal of functionality.

Now, a word on “system-less” role play. Let me warn you about these place, you will sooner or later run across them, that allow people to make shit up as they go. Places where there are forum, email, chat, or combination’s and some outpatient from a Thorazine clinic had the bright idea that role play without any rules or guidelines based on the literary works of some whacked out British author is a GOOD idea. You’ll run across “furry” sites where people are playing otherwise normal characters except they are DOGS or CATS of RABBITS or wookies or oompa-fucking-loompahs or platypus’ or whatever. It’s one thing to meander into a Star Wars game that’s marginally skirting Lucas’s ideas on the futuristic worlds of space… it’s another thing to run across a site where people are writing bad gay porn involving Howard the Duck and Jar Jar Binks and think it’s a GOOD outlet for their creative “juices”. (Ewww.)

So be warned… there are good sites, and there are bad sites, and then there are the sites where there are no rules to the game they are playing. Stay off the later.

One last note… the pursists and those who have gamed for a LONG time will note that I have missed a HELL of a lot of game systems. Well, that’s because when I get on I find only a few of them still out there. Scion and Aberrant and a few other games show up here and there, but those represent the most widely played that I have run across. There’s so many out there that if I was to try and review or give you a brief on every game system that is out there and could possibly be played online… well, if I was going to write THAT much I’d be punching out novels and trying to at least get PAID for it.

Anyway, that’s it for now… more on the topic of online venues and games and specific sites and so on and so forth later.

-The Fireman.

The Fireman’s Guide to How Making Friends and Enemies!

Ahh, I am in a rather foul mood today. Not that you, dear reader, care one bit what my lethargic ass is feeling in my world while you suck down a nice Frappucino and nibble biscotti at Starbucks. (I’m dreaming… with most gaming geeks I’m lucky if I got you sucking down a big mac, a large fries and an apple pie at McDonalds and not sitting in your underwear in grandma’s basement, but I digress…)


So. Friends and Enemies. Let me first offer up this advice: NEVER believe what people tell you on the internet, and as much so in online games if not more so. For instance: in one recent escapade that made me laugh until my considerable girth quaked and my sides ached, a player in an online venue was panhandling – he was trying to get money, as in, REAL MONEY, out of players by feeding them some sad-sack story about being homeless and living in his car.


Folks, use some common fucking sense! If I was homeless and had nothing but a car and a laptop, I would NOT spend my time panhandling in an online role playing game, I would be looking for fucking work! Where the fuck would he GET internet access anyway? What, he parked in a McDonald’s parking lot while some schlub reads THIS post and hacked old Ronald’s wireless? He used his last five bucks for a Latte so he could use the Starbuck’s wifi? If you believe this story, then I have this check for 54 million bucks that’s stuck in Nigeria and I just need your bank account numbers and pin to deposit it and we’ll split the money, okay?


Friends come easy. Everyone online wants to gather the new blood and enamor the rookies unto themselves and form up packs and cliques and coteries. I do too; I just want to get people to realize that 1. It’s JUST a fucking game and 2. If they will just be cool to each other, then everything else will fall into place. There’s some genuinely good folks online, and then there’s the Rick Walker’s of the world. I don’t know if Rick Walker is a real person, but he was one of the most impressive cock-bites on the old White Wolf Hunter-net mailing list. I don’t think I have ever seen a more destructive personality in online venues. We dubbed him the nameless one, because we didn’t even want to use his name. Even BEING on a list with him was like masturbating with a fist full of steel wool and lye soap, the amusement factor went away almost immediately and it got painful in a right hurry.


When you get to that inevitable point I hope that you treat the new folks with care and compassion. If a kid wanders in without a book or a clue what the game is about, don’t flame him into cinders and send him crying home to momma, he won’t come back. Get him in a private chat, tell him what he needs, offer suggestions, support, and advice, but be fucking NICE, because if not then pretty soon the only people you are playing with is a close knit group of back-stabbing, shit-talking, stone-cold ass holes and you find yourself without a storyteller or a venue or a site to play on and surrounded by a bunch of highly critical people who have no targets left and they are just waiting to find out that you only have one testicle or you drive a Miata.


Or conversely, the staff of a good site just gets tired of you abusing the new blood and stable players and sends you packing. Frankly, if you are the kind of person to starts flame wars and trolls the foyers of the online gaming world, I am GLAD if they run your ass off. If I am in charge, I’m the kind of guy to do so myself. But then, I’m usually not in charge because I don’t want to be the ring leader.


Now, I know, by now most of you want *NOTHING* to do with me based on what I write and how corrosive I can be in this blog: but let me say this in my defense. I am one of the mellowest people you will meet online. I don’t get irritated and irate and scream and rant, but I also don’t do passive aggressive. I walk away or I tell someone to get bent if they are way out of line and mostly I just relax and keep myself to myself unless someone INSISTS on being an ass hat. Has that made me enemies? SURE! People hate it when someone doesn’t have to beg mercy or put up with them or assuage their guilt or sooth their wounded ego. For some reason online role play tends to gather up more than its fair share of people who have emotional issues and can’t relate well with others. Well, to them I say that this is NOT the place to seek therapy or learn how to deal with the public, if you can’t role play in the real world out there face to face with living breathing people, then you shouldn’t be trying it here. They might need some therapy or perhaps a support group, but that’s not what a game is for.


I encourage everyone who stumbles across and reads this blog to go join an online game once or twice a week, I really do. But if you are 43, never had a date or a girlfriend, and your idea of a hot Friday night is turning off the AC and getting naked to type one handed in a yahoo chat room then do us all a favor and get a grip, life is going to leave you behind. If you are 35 and every man you have ever dated left by sneaking out in the middle of the night without saying good bye because you smothered them to death - don’t look at on line games as a new source of cyber. If you are 18 and have never had a job that didn’t involve fries and milkshakes and you smoke pot nightly, you need to grow some before you give online role playing a shot. And for God’s sake, if you think no one can be as cool or has as firm a grasp of intelligence as you do, build a bridge and get over yourself – or don’t, I don’t care – but stay the hell out of the online gaming community!


Now, on the flip side of that; if you are the kind of person who just wants to escape a mundane existence for a few hours a week, if you don’t get upset and pissed off at words on a computer screen because you understand that they do not impact your existence, if you have a stable relationship and take care of your bills and your own life but just need some place to be more creative… well, then, come on out and play. Jump in, the water is fine.


We NEED that kind of person. Not the whiney, the troubled, the elitist, the harried, the arrogant. Everyone has their faults and flaws, and you’ll find that’s true online, just don’t be and don’t tolerate ass holes - let them play with themselves.


So what about making friends online?


First, let me point out that while I make fun of the notion of a half bald, overweight, pasty skinned middle aged water-head gamer typing one handed in his parents basement, I do so because I have met people like that in the real world. First time I went to meet someone I met online was waaaay back in the days of the dial up BBS, in 1994. Girl claimed to look hot, she looked like someone had set her face on fire and tried to put her out with an ice-pick then let Tammy Faye Baker do her makeup is what she looked like.


Do I care? NO. She was a nice enough person and I didn’t go to meet her for a date, it was a GAME site! In fact, I took my wife because my wife was the one who WANTED to meet her! (Not THAT way you perverts, get your minds out of the gutter!) Anyway, the point is, don’t get your hopes up that the people you are gaming with are sexy beasts that look like their character’s image. Most people for some reason seem to think they are talking with a lonely Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie look alike on the other end of the chat… but it just ain’t so. They got warts and moles and wrinkles just like the rest of us, so don’t get all weird on us and turn stalker. Online meeting people for romance happens, and sometimes it works, just don’t get your hopes up and DAMN sure don’t go online to play with that as your ultimate INTENTION. As far as meeting people goes after talking to them online… one thing is for sure, be careful. There are some really freaky folks out there.

As far as making friends online, I encourage it. The world is best when experienced, and when you get along with folks, it just makes the games all the better.


Game on.

-The Fireman.

The Fireman’s Guide to Surviving Ass Hattery Playing Online.

Ahh. Ass-hats. They make up roughly 99% of the people who game online I think. This group includes a heck of a lot of people at any rate, the butt nuggets who can’t come up with an original idea, the hate talkers on RPG Soapbox, the entire web site who I will not name that has a name like “Icons in the Antechamber.” What the hell is the deal people?

Let me explain – in glorious detail – two things about online games. First there is the site, then there is the people. The site is something not everyone can do. Some jack-offs couldn’t code a site to save their asses but would be awesome storytellers and would run an awesome site, but it never happens because they can’t afford to pay for the site and the code work and all that it involves. Other people can code but they simply don’t care about the game THAT much and things go to shit because they set things up but don’t really care if it’s successful. Still others weasel their way into the games as master or admin and they have no business running a roach motel much less an online game. Everyone online falls in some measure into these catagories when they are running the games: with a mix of benevolence, skill, ego, and arrogance. If you are lucky you have a character in a venue where the guy running the show has some coding skill and a modicum of concern for how things turn out. If not, well, you probably know it but your clinging tenaciously to the hope that things will change. Hah! Might as well go masturbate with a cheese grater, if a site’s admin is an ass hole then the site will forever be what comes out of an ass hole.

The second thing about online games that you must realize is the PEOPLE are just as fucked up as the you get out there in the real world. There’s a smattering of people who are no bullshit honest to god decent people who you would consider gaming with if they lived in town. (I might or might not be in that group, but frankly I don’t care if you like me or not.) The rest of the people online, unfortunately, are the kind of window licking, emotionally disturbed, hairy palmed, basement dwelling cretins that you would normally punch in the face or run away from as rapidly as possible. Occasionally you even get the kind of arrogant pricks you simply never invite to a game again because they have the kind of manners that would prompt the Pope to say: “you know what, YOU are a DICK!” This second group contains the kind of human refuse that can no longer find a game near home because everyone from junior high school to college and beyond who lives near them and especially every group and person who frequents the gaming stores for a hundred mile radius has already either thrown them forcibly out the front door or changed their phone numbers and door locks and gotten a restraining order.

What? You ask, surely there’s no one like that online! Yes, there is, and don’t call me Shirley. Let me assure you, that while a game site can have shitty coding, no online sheets, and a LOUSY looking forum, all those hurdles can be overcome by a GOOD storyteller. On the other hand, a site populated by arrogant pricks is bad news: run the fuck away, it means the Storytellers and Admins have at best a really loose grasp on their site and their players and probably reality or at worst it’s a site where a clique runs things and if you aren’t one of the “kewl(!)” kids you will get NOTHING. It never ceases to amaze me how arrogant people can be, or how narrow minded or short sighted, or how plain estupido.

Here’s the root of the problem: no two people think alike. Now, this in itself is not a problem, if we all thought alike it would be a boring world where all we did was eat the same thing, screw in the same position, and slept at the same time. The problem is that there are SO MANY people online who can’t 1. Come up with an original thought or 2. Have to scream and rant when someone else’s original thought is not up to their personal cool standards. What? You say, dear reader, after hacking on twinks so hard you are going to tell me that it’s bad to get on their idea of fun? You flaming Hypocrite!

No silly. The problem is this: when John Q. Gamer comes along and says “You know what, I want to play a lesbian even though I am a 400 pound fat guy from Paducah Kentucky…” he has every right. He might be a horrible gamer. Who cares? It’s not up to me to flame him off a gaming site – although if he asks me I’m going to tell him it’s a horrible idea and he’s not impressing anyone but I won’t TRY to make the dork feel bad! Besides, people will be quite annoyed with his asinine behavior and alienate him quite without help. If, on the other hand, some twink berry wishes to play something that’s BLATANTLY against the rules, well, that’s where Storyteller’s come in, and should shoot him down. Where the REAL problem starts is when some ass hat who can’t get into a table top gaming group to save his life because he has the personal manners and appeal of a donkey with syphilis has to chime up out of character in the site’s forums or foyer or on some other site and begin to denigrate the guy’s person and character.

It is our god given right to play how we want! So to all you ass holes out there (and I REALLY hope they do read this at some point) who have to attack people out of character for playing concepts just because you don’t like the idea: I hope you get caught under a bus. Frankly, I don’t CARE if someone plays a character I don’t LIKE, so long as doesn’t flat out breaks rules, who cares? We DON’T all think alike. Check your window, if you have one and you’re not reading this in the basement in your underwear, look outside. All those people out there? All 6 BILLION of them? That’s what make the REAL WORLD, that mythical place where shit happens, is the fact that all of them are DIFFERENT!

So when some ass hat slams someone else for having a character that isn’t cool it hurts the whole online gaming community, pretty much like Germany hurt the Jews. It kills us all. If the only people online were some kind of select elite who everyone else thought was KEWL there would be ten people gaming because the average Joe would have LONG since gotten fed up with the arrogant crap and gone back to a table top game with their buddies. THIS, my dear friends, means that online gaming gets LESS amusing over time and more frustrating as good people get fed up with the morons and leave. And it gets worse because sooner or later the elite gamer Nazis run across a group who won’t back down and then things escalate to super nova levels of ass hattery. Look, sometimes the average Joe who’s casual and laid back - he gets behind a keyboard and even though in the real would he wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouth full of it as soon as he has the perceived anonymity of the internet and assumes no one will know who he is he begins to spew forth the most evil, vile, sadistic, ignorant crap you have ever read!

So how does this turn into a “Survival guide” in that environment? Well, here’s the positive light! I hear you gasp in shock, me, painting a positive picture?! Say it isn’t so! Ahhh, but yes, there IS an upside. That is, the really casual morons tend to not care or go away in a hurry, so that guy who would never have logged in to play tends to get sifted out fairly quickly. What I am hoping is that the NEW player who reads this will understand the kinds of nitwits they WILL be encountering and hopefully by being forewarned when they encounter this kind of ass hattery they will not be disenchanted to the point of leaving the online gaming community.

The upside is that there’s also an online gaming community who is non-judgmental, who doesn’t scream foul when they don’t get their way, who doesn’t insist on judging everyone else. It might take a while to find them, they tend to keep their own council and watch each other’s backs very carefully and present a pretty solid front - that’s because they have learned not to trust. Watch for them, my friend reader, watch for the guy who isn’t judgmental and who might leave a scene where some brazen idiot is demanding attention but who doesn’t go off out of character. Watch for the classy lady who avoids cyber and bad drama and worse stereotypes. Watch for the PC’s who when you interact with them you step back and say “That’s an original idea…” Those people, they are probably the ones you want to associate with.

Stay the hell away from anyone who talks crap in the foyers of the various gaming sites or PM’s you with insults about another player. And most of all stay away from anyone who is already embroiled in some kind of flame war at LEAST until you know what the reason for it all is. And be warned, dear reader, that if you DO wade into a flame fest, it can get you booted off a decent site. Choose your battles wisely.

-The Fireman