R.P.G., by Hannah

Recently, I have been involved in a club at school on Friday night.  What the club is centred around is sort of a thing of the past; it is an old game that my Dad even used to play.  The club is called R.P.G. which stands for Role Play Group.  It is like live gaming. A game master (Mr. Ronning, who is in the computer tech department at school and is one of my parent's friends) creates games or missions, such as saving a space colony from aliens taking it over or dealing with an evil group of goblins.  The club has weekly R.P.G. missions.  Mr. Ronning gets ideas and activities from an R.P.G. book that he brought from the U.S.  In my group there are 8 or 9 people (which is an unusually large group) and we come every week to do R.P.G. This group is made up of my friends who are in Grade 9 and 10. Whenever we as a character are doing an important task related to the plot we have to roll a dice to determine how good we will be at what we do.  Some of the things we do that require rolling a dice are hiding, shooting people, and not being seen by people when we are moving. We also have some skills that come with our character and these affect how well we do the task.  Some examples of skills are invisibility, increased aim or charisma, and speed.  It is extremely nerdy and weird because we are all really goofy and it is science fiction and it is just something a nerd would do.  Not only does the game master have control over the plot line of the R.P.G. but the game master can choose the genre also. There are many different kinds of genres. There is a fantasy genre called Dungeons and Dragons that gives powers like invisibility and magic to the gamers but we don't do that genre.  The genre we were doing was a science fiction genre. The setting of this genre was in space.  We began in a ship and ended in a space colony.  The powers in this genre are not as magical which is why our game master choose this genre.  I don't really want to do R.P.G. anymore because it can get very nerdy.  For example, in some genres you have to know and sometimes even memorize the statistics of all the mystical creatures in order to fight them.  This can be very confusing because there are so many characters.  And for each of these characters you have to memorize how they fight, how good their aim is, and how strong they are. Anyways, I feel like it was fun to be able to do R.P.G. with my friends but being that nerdy about characters and gaming is something I don't really like.  I found out as I was writing this blog that my Dad didn't like it too much either.