This is the sock account of a person who loves to RPG.

Very rarely (sadly), I'm a half-orc bard in a table-top RPG (it's our GM's own system, we're betaing it. He's very "inspired" by the AD&D system, still, though) although we haven't met in a while, and maybe it is dying, so I might not be doing that much longer.

More often, I'm a gay blood elf hunter in a very sucky WoW RPGing guild, and a draenei warrior.

Mostly, I role-play characters and scenes set in the Harry Potter universe, the closer to canon, the better.

When I do play canon characters, I usually like to volunteer to play various secondary characters - who also stay secondary characters and don't steal the limelight. I play bad guys who stay bad guys and don't need hugs. I play Death Eaters who are not angsting. I play thugs. I play teachers. Even my OC student characters are all boringly unnoticeable and of average development for their age.

I'm also into adult RPG, mostly D/s stuff, mostly set in the HP universe, too.

My pet peeves are Sues, although they can be entertaining occasionally, lazy mods, and canon rape.

The post,


... should have tipped me off. I am to blame myself. Still. It seemed to be more of a wacky time-waster than anything earnest, but wanting to try out a particular character I've had in mind ever since I watched A Beautiful Thing, I joined the thread. My character was a rather rough, chavvy guy living with his drug-addict single mum, did not know that he's gay, has a hard time opening up to people, was not very physically affectionate due to a history of physical abuse when he was small which also does not express itself in any other way.

The thread starter, someone I'd never played with before, characterised her character as an emo gay boy who had frequently been beaten up by his classmates for being gay, has several piercing, always comes to school dressed in scene kid clothes and who, well, has fallen for his best friend, who does not yet know that he is gay.

My problem and my reason for suspicion for what was to follow stemmed from the feeling I got that as soon as I entered the thread all she was doing was trying to out-do my character in whatever we were discussing, especially when it came to angsting.

Pretty much as soon as I included anything about my character's backstory in my character's thoughts, her character became a mindreader and reacted to everything that was on my chav's mind, even though it was not perceptible in his behaviour. When her character persistently kept questioning mine about things that had only occured in my character's thought, I went with it, arguing that they knew a lot about each other, after all. However, she soon added some things to her character herself.

It started fairly harmless. Her character was bubbly, my character arrived at school in a temper because of the state of things at home. Her character's mood plummeted without any reason. Shortly after, I misunderstood something in her initial post and writing that my character was taller than hers. Her next post reveals that her character is 7'4". I had my character correct himself in the next post, making him shorter. After a short exchange, I had my character start a friendly squabble. Her character had soon managed to pin mine to the ground, and since my character is uncomfortable with this kind of situation I had him freak out and struggle as hard as he can to get away.

After this friendly fight in which my character did not want to be pinned down due to a history of violent encounters she had her character be beaten black and blue and bleeding. He also had a kind of nervous break down, fainting at first, then:


When I asked the player OOC if his parents had died only very recently, as otherwise my character, the best mate, would surely know about it, she posted:

When I pointed out that that was a little sudden and asked why she had not included this in the initial post, she replied,


Now, as I said, it may make me look bad for being so sceptical, and in the game I tried to go with it, but I must say that it does feel as though she was merely using the double suicide as a device to get the main attention back to her character and I don't really know how to deal with this. It did not make sense in the story, as her character is utterly unaffected by the recent violent demise of his parents in all the previous posts, then suddenly had this complete breakdown. It's as though she was playing two characters in the same body, and her explanation (too much sugar from a soda) does not make much sense, either.

If this really happened to her IRL, I'd not really feel comfortable with confronting her and asking whether she's only using this as an attention-seeking device. I did tell her that I did not feel it fit into the thread, but she did not respond to that.

I don't think that I want to continue this thread much longer if the entire point she sees in playing is not having the character interact in interesting ways but have them out-angst my character who is not even angsting - which seems to have been the main point of the thread so far, apart from trying to get my character to kiss hers.

When I joined the HP forum RPGing site I'm on most often, I thought that most of the RPGers might be really bad, but that there were still a few truly stellar ones, far and few between. Most of them left, trickling away one by one, and then I had to go on a hiatus of my own, only to come back to find out that the site seems to have gotten worse than it used to be.

Here are two examples of what I found during my trawls, and from what I have read during the past week, they seem to be rather representative examples, too.
The first example merely had me stare with amazement, but the second one still fills me with gut-wrenching terror.



And exhibit B is not a lone execption from the rule, it's becoming average.

If I can't spend a day on a Harry Potter role-playing forum without being called a "controlling jerk" for not wanting people called various variations on "isabella_cullen" auto my or other canon characters into being a spouse to their vampire Sue, I am truly scared.

One of the many good reasons for hating the Twilight series by Meyer is the constant influx of really, really bad HP RPGers we've been getting in the past months.

I really hope they will all sod off to Equinox.com and don't troll our threads anymore, but seeing as the HEX staff is a bunch of idiots that is not likely at all, since "There is nothing to talk about anymore so we have to move on from the HP thing".

Yeah, right, and the best site to go to to get over Harry Potter is without a doubt the site called "Hogwarts Extreme". Within the chatty areas, this makes some sort of sense, even though the constant "Oh, will you shut up about Harry Potter already!" replies to HP discussions threads really suck, because lots of people have friends on the board they don't want to lose by leaving the board, but in the days of Myspace and Facebook, there are really other options than spamming forums on a HP RPG board.

It's getting even worse in the RP sections. Still, with darling Laura as busy with the Equinox crew and HEX going down the drains I don't know where I'll get my HP RPGing fix from now on. HEX always had a very small number of surprisingly few really, really good players, but they've all left because the board at large sucks or stopped playing.

Now, there seem to be only old hands who actually RP HP topics, the rest have moved on to other things.

The worst them being shitty romance RPGs based in the Twilight verse.