Mage In SF, LARPs
Writing about RPGs has gotten me all misty eyed for my pen-and-paper days past. I though Id try and find a game of Mage in the Bay Area. Posted on Craigslist and the forums for Mage, but I havent turned up much. After looking at the limited level of Internet chatter related to the game these day, I’m starting to think there arent that many people playing Mage. So sad. Maybe I’ll just have to storytell a game myself, or perhaps consider other game worlds like Vampire or D&D.
I’m finding a good amount of chatter around LARPs though. Jane has given LARPs a shot and survived. I’ve only had one LARP experience about 4 years ago, and I didnt find it nearly as fun as pen-and-paper. My LARPs experience was similar to my MMORPG experiences so far–heavier on the interaction than the imagination. There was lots of stuff going on, cool costumes, etc., but I competed with 40 other people for prominence in the plot. Costumes and 3D rendered environments never seem to match the richness of the unrendered worlds created in my head when I’m playing a tabletop game. I think each of these medium has their strengths, but most people still try to shoehorn the strengths of pen-and-paper RPGs into them. Perhaps they require and deserve their own gameplay paradigm. I bet that well really see them come into their own over the next 10 years.
Updated on October 5th, 2013
Some of the links were broken. I replaced them with working links to pages with the same or similar content as before.