Roleplaying Nostalgia

What is the difference between the old RoD roleplay and the old sec school/JC tabletop gaming, and the roleplay I get nowadays from my RP-supergroup in City of Heroes? The later seems a poor shadow of the former.

Out of the blue, I am filled with an urge to read the old RoD rp logs. Unfortunately, I've lost all of them due to various hard-disk related seizures over the years. There are no logs of desktop play, but I still remember silly moments such as when Mona decided to tie some guy up and stuff him in the toilet, which then resulted in a controversy of how everyone was going to use the toilet...a situation I am sure adventurers in fantasy stories did not have to face.

Despite my supergroup's decision to partially migrate to Virtue, I don't seem to be getting any more (or any improved) rp. Some people are too lethargic to move (their painstakingly levelled alts are all on Guardian). Some people have already branched out to other servers, Victory being a huge favorite amongst the Guardianites. Some people, like me, just have vastly reduced playhours.

CoX is fun. I plonked down a year's subscription for the discounted rate after my little tour of current MMOs. It isn't as hugely fun as it was two years ago, but it's the most fun of what is available. For me anyway. I guess someone who loves ratracing, raiding one dungeon map for a year to get a piece of equipment, camping spawns, snail-like movement speeds, etc will find other MMOs more fun.

But CoX isn't a good medium for rp. Perhaps some hardcore Virtuenites have great success using the costume creator for
roleplaying, but me, I'm cursed with a powergaming streak. I find it hard to stroll around a
mission emoting, so in the end I just end up not saying much, charging on and on to the next
spawn and dragging everyone after me.

Basically, when I play CoX, I have the urge to do a communal 3rd person shooter, not roleplay. That's why I'm using Rental Shivan during the Friday sessions -- Shivans don't talk or do anything, they just lumber forward and throw balls of radiation at mobs, right? :)

I think the problem with doing dedicated rp is that you have to allocated a large time chunk to it. During my brief stints of returning to rp in RoD (when I got bored of mkilling and pkilling), rpers in OSI complained to me that I was rping too slowly...since I wasn't on for hours every evening waiting for rp with person after person. Sorry -- just like I don't feel like doing hours and hours of "obligatory" mob-running, Hamidon-raiding, etc, I don't feel like sitting around doing hours and hours of obligatory rp, which more often than not involved idling on some rp character waiting for the right people to turn up.

Perhaps a scheduled, rp-focused event needs to be scheduled at regular times for the best rp action to happen. This leads me to wondering if there are adult tabletop gamers in Singapore. Or is this one of those "kiddie games" that only teenagers play? Besides Faya and our old group, I only know two other people who used to play tabletop games -- but only when they were young.

Is it possible for a bunch of adults to sit around a table and act out their dorky imagination? Or has adult society brainwashed us into trying to act mature, stifling our ability to roleplay?

I think my rp interest has shifted slowly from the more hack-and-slash of AD&D to the drama-focused White Wolf LARP-type games. I wonder if it is possible to start up tabletop sessions again with the White Wolf games...