Very very short version: I am a very busy (60+ hour work-week) computer programmer who loves to read, and sometimes to write. I am exploring casually role-playing if I can find a group with similar interests who are easy-going types who want to role-play heroes on short quests or a chain of quests and are more interested in story-telling than "gaming."
Some constraints...
* I'm looking for something pretty freeform. I'd like to play a couple one-off quests with few consequences and not much universe-impact. If I go dark, I'm OK with people temporarily using my character to suit their purposes or kill him/her off.
* I'm looking for old-school fantasy, with thieves and fighters and mages and a spectrum inbetween. I don't want to play in a sci-fi universe. To put it simply, I want to use a sword, or a bow, or a staff, or a lockpick, and I want to be able to use magic. The universe should be loosely D&D, but I loved how Quest for Glory took D&D and mixed-in regional mythologies, so I have no problem with a universe that has Lovecraftian horrors as well as your goblins, orcs, and ogres.
* I do not want to post one sentence at a time. 2+ paragraphs depending on the narrative and frequency.
* Death should not be final. I don't really care about the specifics, but you shouldn't be allowed to kill off someone else's character without their consent. Perhaps IRC or Skype or some other kind of chat is used for such determinations.
* I need creative people to draw from, because I don't consider myself particularly creative. I'd rather contribute a verse than be responsible for writing the story.
Non-bullet-point explanation:
Many years ago, I was very active in a small group of role-players. A particular campaign that I draw great nostalgia from was very simple: a small team of intermediate heroes must defend an isolated city that some evil arch-villain is sending minions to destroy. I created a male Paladin character that was unusually young and another player chose a much more experienced (but not necessarily more powerful) female Paladin that she had used in previous quests. This created a natural mentoring dynamic, our characters quickly bonded, and even though everything was pretty stock, our small group, led by that female Paladin (who also wrote the premise and had a lot of experience RPing) valiantly defended the city, navigating moral and ethical dilemmas. What really captivated me was how quickly the group bonded naturally bonded, even though most of us made them up just for this adventure, and how an interesting plot emerged just from a handful of paragraphs here or there. In the end, the city was saved, and the arch-villain destroyed at the cost of one of the players. The story would bore you if you read it just for fun, but the process, the journey of actually writing it with others was exhilarating.
Unfortunately, our group was held together by a fan-made video-game that we were all working on. It died ever-so-slowly, and then we drifted apart. I threw myself into other projects and social groups and never had a chance to get that thrill again.
But I'm no longer in school. I work for a living. I enjoy playing games like Heavy Rain which are more like interactive fiction than a video game. I've loved all of Quantic Dream's stuff. I play KQ6 and Monkey Island II every year. Despite being a solid first-person shooter player (in Halo 3, I was a level 43, which put me in the 80-ish percentile of Halo players) I play them on easy because all I care about is the story and I don't have time for grinding RPG's anymore or I'd be replaying FF7-9 all the time. I see them as a movie I can take part in. Personally, I think that playing videogames for their story as I do will become prevalent and mainstream, just like seeing a movie today, but that's a subject for another time.
Everything to say, I have an itch for a story I can take part in, and reading/writing seems like the only thing I really do consistently. Anyone here have subforums or other communities where the play-style I talked about above is successful? Somewhere I can dip my toe in the water and see if adventuring on forums is something I would enjoy doing consistently or just a fad in my teenage years? Perhaps I just got lucky, being involved with some great writers and good people in general and shouldn't waste my time looking to find it again? Any thoughts?