Roll for initiative.

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately from the likes of Wil Wheaton and Penny Arcade, and it's really got me in the mood to play a little Dungeons & Dragons. My fingers are just itching to warm up some polyhedral dice and see what happens.

There are a few problems, though.

Let's start with the most blaringly obvious one: I don't have anyone to play with right now.

"Well, Rebekah," you say, "why don't you go ask some of your friends to play with you? I'm sure you can think of several offhand who would be thrilled." Um, yes, I can. But I'd rather not ask those particular friends. It's nothing against them, you see. I just know from past experience that I'm a thoroughly neurotic roleplayer and a thrown-together group of your run-of-the-mill nerds is the one thing precisely calculated to turn me into a psychotic, twitchy-eyed banshee. I have witnesses.

The trouble comes from having a different idea about what I want to get out of a tabletop RPG. Most of the people I know who would be interested in this sort of thing are of the hack'n'slash variety, the kind who like to spend half an hour scouring rooms for treasure and to waste half the night buying supplies. No offense to those people, but what the duck? I thought we were playing a roleplaying game. You know, wherein you play a role. I've always been more interested in developing the characters and the story than in racking up XP. I want the players to talk to each other as their characters, build up these fictional lives, not just stare raptly at the DM waiting for stimuli to respond to.

But where do I find people who are interested in that sort of thing? If I put out a call for players, I'm bound to flush out every hack'n'slash on my Facebook friend list. The only method I can think of is to quietly send out feelers to people like I'm some kind of shady black market vendor, but where do I start? How do I find someone with the brand of humor and creativity that I'm looking for?

Maybe I should just clone myself with Calvin's Duplicator.

Of course, even if I did, I don't have any manuals. I've done that whole I-don't-need-no-stinkin'-manual thing before, but after listening to these podcasts, I kind of want to try the 4th Edition system. I could go for a little structure.

But even then, I would inevitably end up as the DM of any group I managed to scrape together, and bog nab it, I wanna play! It's like skipping your childhood. I'm not ready to be the parent.

I suppose if this is the extent of my life's problems right now, then I really shouldn't be complaining.

Listening to: 17 Again
Reading: Falcondance by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes