The Plight of the ERPer

I'd fit in perfectly!

Despite how trendy it is nowadays to roll a level 1 on Moon Guard and laugh at the batshit crazy RPers in Goldshire, my friend was so bored the other night that he convinced me to go on an excursion with him. Now, I can attest that all the horror stories that people tell about this server's ERP epicenter are true.

First off, it was 4am and it was as crowded as my server's Stormwind is on a Tuesday night. It was obviously prime time for WoWers looking to "camp an instance portal," if you know what I mean. Also, the anonymity was prompting some of these guys (and you know they're guys) to say some of the most off-color/offensive/nowhere near subtle sexual utterances that I never imagined I would encounter, much less be exposed to in a public space. It makes me wonder what percentage of the Goldshire crowd is seriously looking to cyber and how much of it is just trolls from other servers doing as the Romans do.

Yes, there are definitely people looking to find someone of supposedly the opposite sex with which they can type one-handed. I even found some guy wanting to Skype-sex a daddy/daughter scenario, which IMO was a pretty smart way of guaranteeing the gender of the person with which he's touching himself. I said no thanks, by the way.

And then there are people like my friend, who was getting way into the spirit of the festivities and walking up to any and all naked players, propositioning them by walking into them repeatedly from behind. How is an honest sexual deviant supposed to find a good time with assholes like that floating around his hangout?

Poor Moon Guard. I feel your pain.

-Avia.

RNG never fails to displease.

A couple weeks ago (yea, I've been a bit truant lately), I played my first ever game of D&D, and it was even geekier than I had imagined it! As a creative writer, I always wondered why I never got into tabletop RPGs. I'm not even sure if people still RP in WoW though I sure as hell try to as much as I can on a PvP server. You'd be surprised how many people in Stormwind are willing to join in on a costume party and (jokingly?) erotic scenarios, but it's usually by the time someone says something disturbingly inappropriate about women/children/orifices that the crowd disperses in a trail of nervous laughter and I fear for the future of our species.

Anyway, during my aforementioned adventures in Hypergeek Land, I found that the things people like the most about tabletop RPGs, i.e. the face-to-face interaction and regular convening of friends in real life, are pretty big turnoffs for someone who has trouble conversing with people outside of a typed environment, i.e. me. I can't even remember the last time I was in a group setting, but I'm certain alcohol was involved. However, my guildies and I got over even the hurdle of having to meet up in person to D&D: we play over vent. Apparently, I'm a druid who shoots things with a bow and can tame animals. Obviously, the graphical interface isn't as sophisticated as WoW, but that's what my imagination is for, right?

Guess which one I am!

After engaging in a few battles, I noticed an important flaw in our setup. All the dice rolls are automated by d20pro's AI, and as anyone who plays WoW knows, all /rolls by a player will suck balls EXCEPT when they're not yours. After the fifth miss on a mob, one of which actually whiffed so badly that I hit my teammate for full damage, I was starting to think that playing a game based on lucky rolls wasn't such an encouraging prospect. Some people might say that it's not luck; it's probability. But after five years of playing WoW, I know that the probability of whiffing a roll and losing your item to a "teammate" is so close to 100% that it defies the laws of statistics.

I'm expecting Morgan Freeman to show up any day now to do a special on the numerical wormhole that was ICC. Stupid Rotface trinket.

-Avia of throttled inequalities.