This is gonna sound weird.

I miss my RPG characters.

Having gotten disgusted with too many of my fellows in on-line RPGs some years ago, and having moved away from my tabletop group some months ago, I have no gaming going on whatsoever at the moment, and I am left feeling curiously bereft. It’s not that I have any burning need for escapism at the moment, and no time to do it in even if I did, but still…I miss ’em. I miss Jackal, who made her living through organ piracy and had all the charisma of a leperous warthog, and who’s only saving graces were zealous loyalty and the sporadic ability to kill people by touching them. (There is something strangely liberating about being absolutely and completely objectionable.) I miss Knight-Errant Severl the Unsympathetic, organized crime aficianado who masqueraded as a paladin, who could do the most heinous things in public and, for reasons I’m still not clear on, almost always got away with them through sheer force of personality, and the fact that the line between being Noxiously Good and Noxiously Bad is very thin and easily danced on. (The key is self-assurance. People will go along with anything if you are A) self-assured, and B) they suspect you may hurt them.) I miss my psychotic samurai Mouse, who assumed that impossible odds simply did not apply to her, and who believed herself to be a person of great honor and high moral standards, and was always shocked to learn that everyone else in the party thought she was a deranged serial killer. (To be fair, both sides had a point.)

On a completely unrelated note, until watching monster movies on the Sci-Fi channel, I had no idea that crocodiles exploded. You learn something new every day.

I am hoping to someday locate another good RPG group, although the GM would have huge shoes to fill–Chris, our Shadowrun guru from St. Paul, was one of the most blindingly creative GMs I’ve ever met, even if he did insist on a little too much realism in explosions (i.e. nothing blew up, ever, unless a great deal of plastic explosive and knowledge went into it.) Cars never exploded unless you threw grenades into them. Possibly we should have been using crocodiles.

I miss the stupidly over-the-top stunts that one can do in RPGs. I miss having a character that could kill a giant granite gargoyle by smashing a pitcher over it’s head. I miss charging into a room with a katana, no back up, and ten or fifteen foes, and believing that I had better than even odds. I miss dangling from the roof of a careening van full of zombies, being shot at, stabbing randomly through the windows, and feeling that the situation was totally under control. I miss taking on Elder Gods with rocket launchers, or building complex devices out of large aquariums to expose vampires to sunlight with the least amount of collateral damage. God help me, I even miss the time Mouse accidentally snorted a shoggoth and had to have her sinuses roto-rootered, possibly a low point in the history of Lovecraftican encounters.

Someday, I’ll get moved, and have time for this sorta stuff again…