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As you may already know, if you’ve read some of my previous posts, I have this tendency to deviate a little bit from pure D&D talk to something a bit different. And today is just one of those days.

Garry’s Mod is a modification to Valve’s games that are based on the Source engine. Even though it’s now a mod that you have to pay for, it still requires you to own at least one Source engine game that was developed by Valve Software.

One of the cool things about Garry’s Mod is that you can create different game modes for it, so that you don’t have to always play in a sandbox. There’s several cool game modes to choose from, such as Spacebuild, Prop Hunt, and Stranded, just to name a few. There are even a few roleplaying mods now available, and the number of them seems to be growing recently.

Roleplaying In Garry’s Mod
It seems that one of the first roleplaying game modes created Garry’s Mod has been Role Play Gamemode by cg123. However, that mod is no longer supported, and you’ll be lucky to find a Garry’s Mod server that even uses it. There are many other roleplay game modes out now that are worth exploring! They include:

• LightRP - The first of the more complex roleplaying game modes.
• DarkRP - Based off of LightRP, it expands on various ideas.
• MesaScript - Based off of DarkRP, but is specific to roleplaying in the Black Mesa Research Facility
• StargateRP - Also based off of DarkRP (though may be switching to a newer one), and is specific to roleplaying in the Stargate universe.

These roleplaying modes the ones that you’ll find most prevalent on Garry’s Mod servers. However, as a word of warning, it does appear that DarkRP is a bit strongly biased towards combat, perhaps even to the point of being a simple deathmatch rather than any kind of roleplaying occurring. If you don’t mind combat heavy roleplaying though, then it may still be worth checking out. Though, despite this, not every server is going to be the same, so be sure to explore a bit!

There’s also been a few new roleplaying gamemodes in development to try to overthrow DarkRP. There seems to be many people who are upset of DarkRP becoming more of a deathmatch game mode rather than an actual roleplaying game mode. A couple of the new game modes are CakeScript and Catscript. I’m sure that once they’ve matured some more, they’ll eventually replace the predominant roleplaying game modes that are available now.

Freeform Roleplaying - A Quick Guide
Even though the above mentioned roleplaying modes can give you some structure, it can still be rather disarming how much freedom you have with them. There’s no experience points, skill points, feats, or even ability scores to keep track of.

However, the lack of numbers should not hinder you one bit with roleplaying. Besides, it’s supposed to be more about imagination, not numbers!

With most of the roleplaying game modes listed above, you’ll be able to choose some sort of job. Depending on how the server is configured, you may be paid a different salary depending on the job you take. Once you’ve taken a job, use that as your guide as to how to roleplay your character.

One example I can think of, using MesaScript and roleplaying in a recreation of Black Mesa, is one player taking the role of an engineer, while I was the chief of security. The engineer came in to start his day, but required a security access code before he could continue. So he contacted me, a guy in security, so enter the code for him. One cool thing this player did was create a screen using WireMod that he was able to change. While I pretended to enter the code for him, he changed the readout of the screen he created, so that it sort-of looked like I did something.

Another instance during this same roleplaying session was again him contacting me. His device was picking up some sort of anomaly, so he asked me (the security guard on duty), to investigate. The player actually lead me to the place he wanted me, but it was more of an out-of-character thing. Once getting to a good place, he spawned a bunch of headcrabs, which my security guard character dispatched using his available weapons.

So, as you can see, despite the complete lack of numbers (aside from salary and money saved), you can still roleplay. This is really the core of what roleplaying is about, just using your imagination and having fun with it. Besides, Gary Gygax did apparently say:

The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don’t need any rules.