Chatroom Role Playing Worlds

Games of pretend have come along way from the childish versions they once were. Now there are several ways in which you can pretend to be someone or something else and interact with other who do the same, battle dragons, or live in a different time period, or delve into the realms of myth and legend. The most common form of this is in video games, but we all can agree that a video game has a preset personality for its characters, and while you act with them, they are not truly of your making and they only have so many programmed responses to events that happen in the game. Internet games such as MUDD's like Achaea and CD ROM games like Everquest and more, give a player more free reign but still there are only so many races, maps, personalities, and features programmed into it. There is always the long-lived live RPG's with either dice or full dress and acting such as there is with Renaissance fairs and the like; these allow for the personal creation of almost every aspect of the character and the personality of the player to come through more than it would on a game. Yet, live RPG's have the difficulty of each player's distance from the other and the major effort put in to organizing every player involved to meet at a specific place at a specific time. And, with conflicts in work schedules and school schedules and all the other nuances of life that waylay our plans and produce new ones, such meetings are few and far between and perhaps once or twice a year all members will be present. The RPG least likely to run into these problems, though it has drawbacks like the others as well, is role playing in Internet chat rooms.