So I fully admit, I feel like I live under a rock sometimes. Every week I discover new things about roleplaying games, the roleplaying industry, and roleplaying websites, that it seems like everyone else knows about but me. One of those discoveries I came across this week was RPGBomb. RPGBomb is a social network website for roleplayers. Think “MySpace + Facebook + Roleplayers = RPGBomb”.

A great description can be found on their website’s about page. “RPGBomb.com is an online service that allows their members to set up unique personal profiles that can be linked together through networks of friends and associates. RPGBomb.com members can view each others’ profiles, communicate with old friends and meet new friends on the service, share photos, post blogs and comments, and describe their interests. To enrich our members’ experience, we request and display some personal information to other members and visitors, which allows our users to identify each other and expand their network of friends.”

I joined this week so I could check out the different features. Immediately, I found it to be an active community of like-minded people. I was invited into the RPGBomb Gaming Movement group and DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) group immediately. It was pretty cool because both of those groups are things I’m interested in. The RPGBomb Gaming Movement group talks about the gaming industry as a whole, how sales are down overall and the industry is having issues, so what can we do about it? The second group, DAoC, talks about one of my favorite past-time MMORPGs that I used to play. I was invited into these groups not because I got randomly spammed to them, but because they read my profile that I had filled out and matched them to my interests.

The site has a little bit of a clunky feel to me right now. I’m not sure if it is because I’m new to the site, or if it is because they could use a slight redesign. But it has a lot of the major functions that most networking sites have, except it is geared towards gamers. Sometimes they don’t feel as intuitive to me as I think they should, but either RPGBomb will improve their interface slightly or I will get used to it.

One of the reasons I’ll be using RPGBomb is that it definitely puts you in touch with people that have interests in roleplaying. To anyone who runs a roleplaying website I see it as a great way to network with potential readers. I also see it as a great way to connect with roleplayers if you are a gamer that currently doesn’t have a group. Finally, I also see it as a good way to keep on top of what is really going on with the roleplaying industry, because there are some people having some pretty frank discussions roleplaying as a whole.

You can check out RPGBomb at ‘http://www.rpgbomb.com/’. If you decide to join, throw me a friend invite.  You can find me under the member name ‘SamVDW’.  Go check it out!