[] Real RPGs

Does anyone play "real" RPGs anymore, like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, any pen and paper games? I've just gotten back into playing Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, but I used to play WAAAAAAAAAAAAY back when D&D first edition was out. My highest level character that I started at first level was my 10th level cleric.

All I see in the RPG section are posts for video games and I was just wondering if anyone still sits around a table with their friends and rolls a handful of dice.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by guyinrubbersuit

So why are pen and paper RPGs real and not digital ones?

The only difference between pen and paper RPGs and digital ones are that the whole setting is created by the DM and imagined by the players. I find that no digital graphic can compare to what we imagine. I think that is why when you read a book, the movie never compares to it, because what to are watching is only one person's inturpertation (I know I spelled that wrong) of the setting.

Plus, you can add your own personallity into your character in a P&P game, you can't do that in a video game.

The big drawback, as Terminus pointed out, is getting all your friends together in one place.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I started playing again P&P D&D with the same people that I stopped playing with like 20 years ago. It is alot of fun, playing with friends rather than strangers. Strangers (even in the multi-player video game RPGs) get easily offened and report you to a DM and you get in trouble, not fun. To me, the fun of an RPG is doing things and acting in ways that you never would in real life. I play by the rules and am nice to other people every day of my life, P&P gives me (and my friends) a chance to kick back and be a-holes to each other the way we never could in a video game.

It is harder to get a game going in P&P, we only play about once a month, but I find it light years more rewarding and the characters that we create, more real, then when we used to play EverQuest online together.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

To play any P&P RPG you have to be playing with people you are comfortable with. If you are playing with strangers, it's not going to be fun, even if you know all the rules. In alot of ways, it is alot tougher than playing video game RPGs, but if you have a good group, you can have much more fun.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Another difference I found about video RPGs is after I finish them, I have no memory of playing them. I can't look back years later and have warm, fuzzy memories of the fun and trouble my character caused; where-as playing D&D, I have tons and tons of laugh-out-loud stories that me ,or my friends, bring up years later.

Now I am lucky if I can get these friends together once a month. I use video game RPGs to fill in the time inbetween, but they could never take the place of live-RPGs IMO.

I was speaking idiomatically.