Me? Well... I've been
a role player since D&D came in a box. I've played
for decades and tried a bit of everything over the years,
table-top and live, Fantasy to SciFi, with systems that
I would be embarrassed to mention. I've watched the
gaming industry become flooded with products, some that
should have been relegated to the realm of the vanity
press (the Rocky and Bullwinkle RPG, anyone?) and still
others that are but thinly veiled marketing concepts
grown in a lab to do battle with other systems that
threaten to capture market share (I'm looking at you
Shadowrun). I have seen systems that take the industry
in a new direction (kudos to White Wolf for developing
LARP for the mainstream) and systems that challenge
the status quo (R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020, for a
simple yet realistic firearms system and fresh Scifi
world, and Steve Jackson Games' GURPS for developing
a quality "universal" system). I have collected
their supplements, revisions, and expansions and sifted
through them for the few bits of data useful to my games
and have found them wanting.
What I have seldom seen is a game that steps beyond
the "publish or perish" mentality that pervades
our hobby. A game that supports the player instead of
bilking them out of their hard earned currency by pushing
out new text every few months with more "stuff"
or "new rules" buried somewhere within their
shiny new covers.
The industry is crying out for a system that promotes
community and creativity, one that helps to find roleplayers
and draw them together creatively. Few RPG companies
help you to find a gaming group and those that do enforce
a hierarchy among their ranks that interferes with the
ability to play the game itself (that would be you,
Camarilla).
Roleplayers, we have walked a hard road. We have been
called names. We have been treated as evil or insane.
We have shared the guilt of merely wanting to share
a hobby with our friends that exercised our minds, our
creativity, and our comradery. We have written for long
hard hours and years to turn rules into art. We have
worked hard to retool barely playable systems and static
world backgrounds to fit our needs and to tell the stories
we want to play. We have earned a say in this industry
beyond the purchasing power of our dollar or the prestige
of our characters. Our time has come!
