Learning to Play

When I was a kid, my best friend and I spent half our time pretending—we were lock smiths who moonlighted as thieves, we were pioneers on the Oregon Trail, we were jockeys riding in the Kentucky Derby, we were witches making potions, and we were a thousand other things I can’t even remember.

It’s easy to play when you’re a kid. Pretending comes easier to children, who don’t feel the same limiting attachment to the so-called real world. Sure, maybe you had to clean your room or pick up sticks in the yard to earn your allowance, but responsibility was only something you knew for a spelling test.

As an adult, playing is hard. We’re attached to the notion of ourselves as our ideas and our pesky responsibilities. We are our jobs or our relationships, and we very often like those identities. It’s hard to let them go without feeling self-conscious or just plain ridiculous.

Enter RPGs.

Role playing asks us to put aside our grown-up selves and take up new, fantastical identities. It asks us, for a few hours at a time, to pretend we can cast spells, fight with a sword, heal a wound, or fly like a bird. It asks us to become an entirely new person, a character of our own creation, and to guide that persona through the most magical of adventures.

Role playing is fun.

When I ventured into my first tabletop RPG, I fell in love. I wanted to play. It’s a writerly pursuit, one that demands creativity and willing suspension of disbelief at every turn. And I knew that my nerdy, delightful, online writer-buddies would make just about the best role-playing troupe the world would ever see.

I was right, of course. I’ve teamed up with fellow-Scribes Emmie Mears and Shauna Granger, plus Emmie’s agent and her boyfriend, my own husband, and two other writers, to start an online RPG that will broadcast on the SearchingforSuperwomen.com YouTube channel.

As Game Master, I’ve been in charge of facilitating world and character creation, and these folks have blown me away with their ability to pretend it’s possible for magic to make science and for humans to lock away Elder Gods and let the world around them deteriorate from overuse.

Hmm. Okay, maybe that’s not so impossible to imagine.

But believe me, they’re phenomenally creative, and Magetech, our game, is going to be a rich world populated by strong, unpredictable characters who are nothing short of heroic.

So if you want to see creativity in action, and adults re-learning how to play, be sure to tune in. It’ll be a hoot, I have no doubt, plus we’d like to open up the world and the notion online tabletop gaming to a wide audience and to other gamers and writers.

Intrigued? Emmie and I will be doing an introductory broadcast on Monday, July 1 at 8 PM EDT and the first gaming session will be Monday, July 8 at 8 PM EDT. Be sure to check in on Twitter and our websites for links!