...........I could say that it feels almost like yesterday, but I'd be lying. I don't really remember my first days as a BZPower member that well. The couple of months before and after are clearer, but I have next to no memory from my first day as a member, exactly four years ago now.

...........I'd seen the BZPower website before, in the winter of '03 – but its vast wealth of possibilities didn't hit me, and I soon left for other Bionicle sites, forgetting the name of the site I just visited and not even aware that I had missed the chance to join in on the BZP experience a couple of years early.

...........Extremely fortunate circumstances brought me back to bzpower.com two years later, in the winter of '05 – in the form of two people: xccj and GaliGee. I don't recall what compelled me to poke around in the Epics forum, but it's a good thing I did. At the time, xccj was working on a 12 – chapter saga about an Onu-Matoran with a purple Miru (I don't remember much else about the story), and GaliGee had just begun what would later be her final work before she left for bigger and better things – Tangled Web.

...........I was spellbound. Could it be? People my age (back then I didn't know yet that GG was actually an adult), creating masterpieces out of typed words? Weaving language into works of art, of magic? My eyes didn't leave the screen until I had caught up with the story, and then I regularly returned every few days, soaking up the latest in epic storytelling.

...........Yearning to get closer to this magic, maybe even become a part of it, I registered for membership sometime in late December that year. It wouldn't be another month before my registration was finally approved, and I could make my presence known to the two authors I had come to revere.

...........Then followed a cloudy period of three months – I don't remember much of what I did on BZP then. For sure I stayed firmly rooted in the Library forums, poking my nose into the writings of other authors (Lady K, Turakii, Nidhiki, Macku).






...........Then, it really began.

...........April 7^th. 2006. Dr. Bionicle posted his First Place Winner of the first ever RPG Contest in BZP history – The Academy. I had flirted with the RPG forum before – joined a small RPG as a Matoran version of Onua – but until I joined the Acad (as we old-timers fondly call it), I didn't realize how lonely the RPG forum had previously been. I was lucky to join when I did – I witnessed the restructuring and reorganization, and a new RPG forum rise from the old. I saw these changes from the window of the wildly successful Academy (for about a month after it started, the topic was averaging about three pages a day). I joined other RPGs as well (the Second Place winner, BZPower The Final Battle, for instance), but it was in the Academy that my career in BZP really flourished. I met my first best BZP friends there (Hak, Dwin, Mout, Poks, Tom), and I had huge amounts of fun.

...........Eventually the Academy got so big that it had to be merged into the BZPRPG come 2007, and while, like many other Acad regulars, I wasn't too hot with the idea at the beginning, in retrospect this was the second best thing that could happen to me (the first being GaliGee and xccj). I had a lot of fun in the Academy, true. But I'd been having so much fun there that I had started to get trapped in a box – the Acad was so fun there was no need to go anywhere else, and I stopped visiting the other forums as often. I also developed a narrow perspective about RPGs – only having real experience in the Academy, role-playing with the same group of people this whole time – my RPG skills were starting to get stale, and I hadn't even noticed.

...........The influx of new ideas, the abrupt meeting of other RPers, many of them much more experienced and having been in the game longer (EU, Sera, and Nidhiki, for example – I was delighted to run into Nid again, whose Epic I enjoyed), and who had different outlooks on RPGs – this contributed a lot to my growth as an RPer. I had gotten self-assured in the Acad, certain that I knew all there was about RPing. Encountering and RPing with the old guard caused me to mellow out a bit – to recognize that I had come a long way but still had a long way to go.

...........I didn't forget what had brought me to BZP in the first place. I kept in touch with the Library forums, occasionally dropping by GaliGee's Tangled Web (it took almost two years to finish the huge project). I even (surprisingly to me) scored Second Place in the Short Stories #3 Songfic Contest, with help from Green Day and their Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which I incorporated into my songfic Roaming. With it came lifetime Premier Membership (by a stroke of luck, T-Hybrid, the First Place Winner, already had lifetime PMship so the prize originally meant for him went to me).


...........Then came a personal test. At the beginning of '07 I had joined an RPG in the Completely Off Topic forum called the Naruto RPG. I stuck with it for six months, was rewarded with a position as a moderator – then, during a month-long summer camp, I developed a story arc for the NRPG. I outlined it, thought through every detail, then sent it to the rest of the staff team. I was pumped up about this plan. I couldn't wait to implement it.

...........Then, the RPG was locked. Members who were prone to flaming and inappropriate comments and ICs caused the RPG to degrade to the point that mods had no other choice than to close it. I set to work with the rest of the team developing a version 2.0 of the NRPG. I contributed daily to the first post, thinking about new ideas to help moderate the racy pit that the original had fallen into. My motivation came largely out of a desire to see my perfect story arc in action.

............V.2 of the NRPG came along. For my huge role in the planning process, and the story arc which started out as my brainchild, I was made head Moderator. I was psyched. I now had full control of the storyline, and I planned to see it through.

...........The problem started here. See, I was so hyped about my ideas – I had to make them perfect. I had to make the posts epic, I had to write the arc as fantastically as the writers I idolized had. I spent hours trying to make every post flawless, and as a result, the RPG stagnated. Through my obsession with this one idea that I felt sure would work, I had forgotten the basic goal of role-playing – to have fun. I was starting to restrict the directions players could go, I was putting up walls. I was stifling their imagination. I was failing to realize that length and awesomeness of posts didn't make up for infrequency and incompetence. Version 2.0 of the NRPG, and subsequent versions, became an epic of sorts, with everyone else nothing more than bystanders – spectators, unable to influence the story in any way.

...........Of course, I didn't realize that – but once some players brought their frustrations to me, I had to slap myself in the face. I had come so far in the Acad, in the BZPRPG, and now in the NRPG, I had destroyed all that.

...........At least, that was what I thought. I had resolved to fix my mistakes, when, in the long run of things, these weren't mistakes at all. The NRPG was one huge life lesson – when you're in control of a huge project, it's easy to become too restrictive, too dominating. Gaining a monopoly on where the project goes prevents exchange of ideas and eventually stagnation.

...........My time with the NRPG was in fact a blessing in disguise: I learned firsthand about the difficulties of being boss of a project, about the true dynamic in a team, in which workers had as much say as the boss. It's a good thing I had this experience in an online role-playing game, rather than in real life. What if I became boss of a company, fell into the same hole I had with the NRPG, and screwed up my life?

...........The NRPG did a lot of good for me, mellowing me out, teaching me about the difficulties of leadership and giving me the big picture on things.






...........A few of my BZP friends recently told me that I'm among the more level-minded people they know on the site. That was news to me; yeah, I was the mellow one in my circle of friends in real life, but that was just because I wasn't good at articulating my opinions on the spot, at doing real-time debating. That was because I preferred to go with the flow, averse to the drama that seemingly consumed life. But I had no idea I gave off the same impression online.

...........Just being on this site, just being a part of this message boards system, has really changed me, for the better I think. I have strong opinions like everyone else does.


...........But when I take the time to type things out, that's ten minutes of writing and thinking at the same time. If I'm angry at another member, that's ten minutes of chilling out and letting go of that anger. If I'm in the middle of a forum debate, that's ten minutes where I can second-think myself, see the other party's opinion, and recognize that it has the same value as my opinion. Just having to post my thoughts rather than saying them right then and there has given me open-mindedness, a better temper, and the ability to see things from an outside-the-box, long-term perspective. Over the past four years, BZPower has improved me as a person, and for that at least, I'm grateful. Thanks to BZPower, I'll certainly be more prepared to tackle the problems that the real world is sure to throw at me.