Pender: When did you begin role-playing?

Delphine: My experience with roleplaying started around 1990. I had run several game ideas past a friend of mine, and one of the suggestions he gave was to look into Dungeons and Dragons...from there I suppose it's just snowballed.

Pender: What RPG systems do you have experience with?

Delphine: Well, I suppose that depends. If you're considering just published pencil and paper systems, I've played Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun and a bit of Alternity. But often roleplaying can happen with no system, or one cobbled together at home.

Pender: Back to your first Dungeons and Dragons game for a moment...were you a player or a DM first?

Delphine: I believe I was cast in the role of DM that day, testing out the first adventure I had written. In retrospect I'm sure it was hardly a masterpiece, but I was certainly proud of it at the time.

Pender: You've certainly had a fair share of experience as both a DM and a player; which do you prefer?

Delphine: That's a very hard question to answer. The advantage of being DM is that, if there's a situation you'd like to see, you can put it into the game. But as a player you have the pleasure of sitting back and enjoying someone else's world, the pleasure of falling into a role without worrying about NPCs, the weather and any of a hundred other variables the good DM constantly tracks. I find myself the DM more often than not because it's the job few other want... But with good, solid gamers in the other positions either role can be equally rewarding.

Pender: What is your favorite aspect of RPGs?

Delphine: Another complicated question. What I've found in well run RPGs is that, out of nowhere, an incredible moment can take place. Often in a movie or book, there are scenes powerful enough that we remember them, whether for their emotion or the well choreographed action. Similar scenes can occur in RPGs, and it's these sorts of moments I think most of us play for.

Pender: In addition to pen and paper RPGs, you're also a player of MUDs and video games, both console and PC. Did your interest in those come before or after you began playing Dungeons and Dragons?

Delphine: I would have to say after, but it was more a parallel interest than a related one at first. After all, there's only so much roleplaying one can do in Mario Brothers and the like. On the other hand, my interest in MUDs was peaked at first by Simutronics and their text-based games, which actually still had significant roleplaying at the time.

Pender: Are the three forms of gaming more connected to each other now?

Delphine: Forgive me if I misunderstand the question, but I believe I understand where you're coming from. It seems to me that they really aren't. While great strides have been made in video games, they still are, at heart, not RPGs....one's role is never unrestricted - the capabilities haven't progressed that far. It's because of this ineptitude of video games in the roleplaying genre that I primarily play shooters now, which is one genre video games excel at. On the other hand, MUDs do often allow very high quality roleplaying, depending on the MUD and the players involved...but I'm of the opinion that the roleplaying one finds in MUDs is, at heart, vastly different from the sort that can occur in pencil and paper RPGs.

Pender: You understood perfectly. A bit about your website, how old is it?

Delphine: I had been throwing the idea of such a website around for quite some time, but it was only three months ago now that it actually became a reality. It'd likely have been put off even longer, but I was in need of a place to archive past threads in a play-by-post Shadowrun game.

Pender: What can we expect to see on your site in the future?

Delphine: At this point I really don't know. There have been ideas tossed about, but none seem to posses merit at this time. Over the past several years I've been developing a MUD, albeit at an exceedingly slow pace. Should that project ever reach a passable state of completion, an addition to the site will be made for it. But that aside, my only plans at present are further essays.