Asperger and Role-Playing

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I roleplay in Lord of the Rings Online. I find that being able to type my conversations rather than speak them out loud gives me more time to think about what to say, both when roleplaying and speaking "OOC" (out of character for all you non-MMO gamers). I find interpreting smileys and online shorthand easier than interpreting body language. If someone says "lol", they are joking. If someone says ":P" (tongue sticking out), they are teasing you, etc.

I find it easier to make friends in the game than in real life. Online gaming is a good way to get to know people, because you have activities to share and thus something to talk about. Crossing the bridge to real life friendship, as in exchanging emails or IM addresses, is still hard for me, though. I never know when it is appropriate to do so, so I don't unless someone asks me first.

I have a pretty good imagination, though not as good as some of the people I play with. I rely on Tolkien lore to build my character and decide how she would be likely to react in a given situation. Usually, she reacts pretty much how I would react in real life, so in a sense I am letting my own personality show in a safe way, because it's not really me.

I always have had a good imagination and was into role play games until mid 20s

Tabletop roleplaying provides the following:

Structure, firmly-defined rules and the chance to be someone else for a while in a world where everyone is a bit different.

A social environment where it's okay to be 'weird', and where everyone is interested in the same thing you are!

Dice of many varieties to roll - pleasant tactile sensation and random number generation.

Mathematics, morality, good story-telling (with a good games master), the chance to imagine doing things that are impossible in the real world.

Reams and reams of information, tables, charts and statistics.

All the above adds up to a great environment for a significant number of aspies.

Roleplaying games are one of my interests - and I do enjoy the roleplay aspect as well as the mechanical/game design aspect. I actually did live action roleplay for several years in the 90s, which really meant highly structured socialization in which everyone interacted according to a specific fictional social context. It was exhausting to do, but I did have fun.

When I play (rather than GM) tabletop RPGs, I have a terrible tendency to rules lawyer.

One of my few interests in RPGs, I love them. They're a great alternative to real life, and super fun.

I prefer somewhat-linear RPGs like the Final Fantasy series, but sometimes like open-ended ones like Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights, but can sometimes easily get bored of them.

I've always wanted to try a tabletop RPG like D&D, but the having to be around people doesn't appeal to me, since I don't like most people.

I used to play World of Warcraft, but I don't have internet right now, so I can't play.


Though, if you are looking for a group were you can be "weird" and no one will notice, then you should take up Magic: The Gathering.

I love role-playing. It gives me the chance to try out different characters.

My current characters, in three different games, are oddly enough all healers; but they are very, very different:

D&D: Perin, a halfling (think "hobbit") who recently escaped from slavery along with his family. He is wanted for "murder" because a guard drowned trying to chase him; so he left his family in order to protect them. Perin misses his family a great deal and writes a journal in the form of letters to Rosemarie, his older sister. He is level-headed and tends to be a peacemaker. He focuses on protecting everyone else (sometimes at his own expense) and has saved the party at least once. Unknown to him, his healing abilities come from a halfling goddess who noticed his devotion to his family and granted him his gift for healing. Perin is currently attempting to retrieve a magical orb that will close a portal to the Abyss; this is a great deal more complicated than it sounds, and involves pirates.

D20 Future: Ludmilla is the ship's medic for a space mercenary crew. She's a party girl with a personality somewhere between femme fatale and just plain scary. She's over six feet tall, with hair dyed pink and blue, and never seen out of high heels--even her battle armor has heels on the boots. Without any formal schooling, Ludmilla is nevertheless extremely intelligent and has a knack for medicine--and a complete lack of bedside manner. Her field surgery isn't anywhere near what you'd expect surgery to be like--it's much more like the medical equivalent of kicking an appliance in just the right spot to make it start working again. She favors anti-tank weaponry, though she has only once used it against an actual tank (most of the time, she uses it to vaporize smaller targets). After a run-in with advanced technology, she ended up with an alien intelligence taking up residence in her brain. Ludmilla is currently on the run after having helped deliver an assassin to her target, a prominent businessman. The assassination was successful, though there was collateral damage to civilians... one of whom was the planet's president. Oops.

Rifts: Jillian is 521 years old. Five hundred years of that, she spent frozen solid in the cryogenics bay of a NEMA bunker in the ruins of New York City. Given all the best gene mods by her parents, Jillian was genetically engineered to carry on the family tradition by becoming a doctor. However, during pregnancy her mother was exposed to dangerous chemicals, and Jillian only survived due to advanced medical technology available during the latter years of humanity's golden age. Jillian was born with a very weak constitution and grew up with her parents being extremely over-protective of her. When she had finally obtained her medical degree, her father wanted her to work at his hospital; but Jillian rebelled and joined the military as a medic instead. When the Rifts opened and New York City was destroyed, Jillian was trapped in the cryogenics unit. Five hundred years later, she was woken by a group of archeologists/treasure-hunters/miscellaneous-rebels who had ventured into the ruins of New York City looking for ancient treasure. Currently, Jillian is an absolute fish out of water, bouncing between nearly insulting the others for being "primitive" and begging them to teach her how this new world works before she gets them all killed. Recently she has been gaining a measure of equilibrium; and despite her near-complete lack of combat skill, has made herself somewhat useful broiling zombies with makeshift Molotov cocktails.

I had tremendous trouble in typical role-playing games. I NEVER could be the "Mother" but could be the child in those since I was just told what to do. That said I always had a wonderful imagination and built my own charaters in that world and played those roles just fine. I think that the professionals are confused. In typical roles, we would probably all be pretty bad but most of us seem to have great imaginations.

I've been on both sides fo the DM/storyteller screen. I am more fond of the role play without the complicated mathmatics of Warhammer. I lean more towarss WhiteWolf's game systems and, if I could find a cohesive group in my area, I'd love to try my hand at LARP. In the interim, I've roleplayed online which I love and I've taken all that writing and translated it into a hobby writing fiction. Which I find challenging because while I have no trouble crating an entire world and a complicated plot in my head - translating it to the page can be quite tedious! I think I just need a wifi link installed in my head...

Technically, role play/fantasy life has dominated my life. I find it very difficult to pull away (not in the loss of reality sense...) and when I cannot retreat to it I'm a very sad puppy indeed.

I played D&D when I was in high school and recently I began to play again. I realised it wasn't the role play that I liked, but everything else. Character building, power and magic item specs, rolling the dices, creating new worlds and strategy. I've passed much more time creating than actually playing a role. I play more like a puppeteer than an actor.

Hey guys, love the thread.
Hope your ready for another tale from the Digsy Chronicles.

I was 15 when I started going to church again, I'd not been for years, mainly due to putting schooling and camping first, naughty I know.
That's when I met Jubby, a good lad, very intelligent, he invited me to play Dungeons & Dragons one day, I thought it sounded exciting so I accepted.
After a few months of playing through all his dungeon books, he started making his own dungeons, up until this point, it had been nothing other than a board game.
But the Jubby rules and dungeons were far more adventurous, and the game took on a chess like aspect, with us trying to out whit each other.
He took great pleasure in killing off my characters and then resurrecting them again.
It got boring after a while though, so he took me to Games Workshop, we saved up and put together for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, woohoo.
After awhile that got boring too, in the meantime though I was spending more and more time in Games Workshop, loved the Warhammer Fantasy Battle (the original rules) and the Realm of Chaos campaigns.
Then they changed the rules and I lost interest, but had made a few friends that also didn't like the new rules, and we set up our own gaming nights above a Chippie (a place in the Uk where you can buy fish, fries (we call them chips) and peas).
Up until this point it had all remained just board games, I loved the strategic aspect to the wargames.
Then I met a group who held AD&D sessions, and I went to observe, the first encounter I had with Role Playing games that were not based around figures on a board.
And some people were enacting their characters, I found that some of these people took role playing so seriously that they had joined re-enactment groups and ran around fields trying to whack each other with replica swords.
Once I got into it I started enjoying the story lines to a lot of the campaigns, I made a crap DM though, couldn't stick to the rules, did voice overs for pretty much every character who always sounded like they were Irish, because it's the only impression I'm even remotely bad at, forget trying any other accents.

Nowadays I prefer online RPG's.

Does anybody know of any good role playing games that I could use to help someone who has aspergers and severe social anxiety?

I don't like role-playing games. They are eggstremely boring for me. My imagination involves mostly manipulations of objects, not a world of people or people facsimiles.