[rustedone]

Just deciding to float an idea and see how many torpedoes get fired at it: Do all of you who participate in cyberfights consider yourself roleplaying?

The word "roleplaying" gets some surprising reactions from people. To some it conjures images of neckbeards huddled in the basement hucking oddly shaped dice, and thus try to distance themselves from that as far as possible.

To me, that is not roleplaying. Sure games like Dungeons and Dragons incorporate roleplaying, but RPGs and RPing have so much more to them that they don't share, making them mostly seperate entities.

Still with me? Okay. Here's my take on roleplaying: roleplaying is like improv acting: you and whoever else involved make it up as you go along, basing your actions on the personality of the character you've assumed. In cyberfighting that character is oftentimes yourself, placed in a fictional showdown with an opponent. Nonetheless, it still counts as a basic form of roleplay, even if both parties butcher the English language using sentence fragments or using "U" and "R" instead of words and suchforth.

Alright, that's my take on roleplaying. What's yours?

[FWO_Boss]

If you are good at cyberfighting, you'd probably make a good DM.

[rustedone]

If you are good at cyberfighting, you'd probably make a good DM.

Had to think about this for a bit, but you're quite right, Boss. Things a good cyberfighter and a good DM (geek jargon for Dungeon Master, for the uninitiated) both need is a strong, vivid imagination, as well as solid communication abilities to be able to convey what's going on to the others involved. (Going on a bit of a geek tangent, this is one of the things I disliked when reading Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's verbose writing style tended to induce zoning out, and thus I could never really picture the various locations and scenes properly).

Looking at the results, we now have one vote for "Roleplaying? That's for D&D nerds!". Be interesting to hear a dissenting viewpoint on the subject...