La Familiais a Role-Playing game, based on the system of Vampire: Requiem. We play every Friday night in downtown Mountain View, CA. Vampire: Requiem is a Live Action Roleplaying Game (LARP) made by a company called White Wolf.

Role-playing is about adopting the persona of a character from a story. You make decisions for your character, and act out your characters part in the story set up by the Game Staff (Storytellers). Every player in La Familia has a character which is theirs to control as they see fit. The Storyteller and Narrators play plot characters, referred to as NPC's (non-player characters) which interact with the Player Characters to create a story. Much of how the story progresses is decided by the participants. When there is a dispute between players how a situation would play out, the conflict is resolved using tests based character statistics found on character booklets and randomized using the simple game of Rock, Paper, Scissors or ROSHAMBO.

If you look at it one way, the picture on the left is of a three brave and somewhat headstrong young Kindred, attempting to survive in the World of Darkness despite the fact that they have been marked with the curse of undeath and may never see a sunrise, grow old with a lover or be free of an inner evil that they will struggle with for the rest of eternity. They were once human, now Humankind can be an enemy or an ally in their fight against themselves. If you look at it another way, it's a picture of some strange people wearing gothic makeup, sunglasses at night and playing dressup, despite being quite old enough to know better. Roleplaying is about opening your eyes to the first possibility, at least for a little while.

None of us live entirely in the real world. Lots of us live, for an hour or so a week, in make-believe worlds called the Starship Enterprise, Gotham City, or an Ancient Greece that looks suspiciously like New Zealand. Some of us live in books. Some watch movies. And some of us, once a week or once a month, visit worlds invented and brought to life by the person with the big pile of books on the other side of the kitchen table.

We walk these worlds in the guise of characters, people we pretend to be. Some characters are larger than life, some are tragically flawed, some are like ourselves with a cursory change of name and a considerably better chance of hitting things. It's not real. But it doesn't have to be real to be fun.

Roleplaying gets called a lot of things - interactive storytelling, freeform theatre, cowboys-and-Indians for grown-ups, meddling with occult forces - and apart from the last one, there's a bit of truth in all these definitions. For me, live action roleplaying (that's where dressing up as a vampire comes in) is more like theatre, and is mostly about telling stories.

When I was a kid, I played with GI-Joe, LEGOs and hotwheels like most kids. I made stories around everything that I played with. I grew up (sort of). I'm still telling stories. These days I've found some people to tell them with me, for which I count myself blessed. The GI-JOEs always did what I expected, and my players almost never do (they don't take well to having their legs pulled off, either, and the GI-JOEs never complained about that) but that's half the fun. Heck, it's almost all of the fun.

It depresses me when people write off my hobby as a pastime for geeky goths with an over-active imagination or think that everyone who has ever pretended to be a vampire is liable to start wearing fangs 24/7 and refusing to answer to the name on their birth certificate. But I suspect the image of roleplaying is going to stay this way, because it's a small hobby, and an easily misunderstood one, and it isn't for everyone.

It takes guts and a healthy sense of humour to pretend to be a vampire in front of your friends. It takes imagination to work out what you're going to do when your back's to a wall, your friend is wounded, and lots of scary people with guns think the information in your pocket is worth killing for. As I said, it isn't for everyone. But it is for me. And it could be for you. So if your interested....