I’ll help if I can Webby.
What drew you to roleplaying, rather than watching the endeavours of characters created by other people (on TV series for example)?
At first, when I was a kid, it was entertaining, and good exercise for my imagination. It also fit or patterned in with some of my other activities, camping, vadding, and the things I was reading, etc. I role-played some but then later on took up DMing and rarely got to play after that because everyone kept asking me to DM, or they didn’t want to do all of the work involved in having to DM.
But I think I (and perhaps many of my friends, based on the conversations we’ve had over the years) saw role playing and D&D (and when we first started D&D was basically all there was) more pragmatically, than as escapism. (There was an element of escapism, but it wasn’t strong.)
Many of my friends and I went into fields like the military, Intel Analysis, law enforcement, detective work, etc. (at least for a time in our careers) and may are the times we have had discussion about the things we learned in role playing being directly useful and applicable to real life. Yes, when we first started we really didn’t think of it that way, but by gaming we fundamentally impressed upon ourselves basic combat tactics, how to analyze and interrogate people, how to explore unknown locales, mapping skills, basic organizational principles, etc. We used the games to practice and research and learn more about such skills, making it that much more fun to play, and to develop interesting scenarios in which we could practice both our game and real world skills. My experiences and the experiences of my buddies may or may not be common in this respect, or they may be common to a certain generation of gamers, and not others. I can’t really say.
I have before encountered the idea among younger gamers that the very idea of a game being used to achieve real world value of some kind, well, based on prior comments, it seems anathema or even crazy to some of them. That an RPG world is one world, the real world another, and never the twain shall meet. Even though my friends and I have been able to do this easily (integrate fictional simulations with the real world) for twenty five to thirty years or so. But I didn’t know what percentage of younger gamers (and by that I mean kids primarily between 20 and thirty or so) feel like that.
However I can say that many of the kids who play in my milieu/group play just like we did, as a sort of fantasy/imaginary/simulational playground for learning useful things about the real world.
But I gotta say. One of my roommates at college was an actor, and acting is roleplay participation in a story. As much as playing in a party for an RPG. It just isn’t usually interactive, that is to say the script is static, open to interpretation by the actor, but usually not open to ad hoc modification. I say that to point out that playing an RPG is role-play participation, but it is usually interactive and open to modification throughout the entire process. That might help as an angle of exploration in your paper. Both are role play participation, one is interactive, the other scripted.
What aspect of roleplaying do you enjoy the most? (Escapism? Creating an original character? Being able to tell a collective story? Doing things you're unable to IRL?)
I liked character creation. I liked practicing things like acting and debating and forensic skills. I liked problem solving. Yes, you could do things you couldn’t do in real life, but even those things were usually applicable in a general sense to real life. So I didn’t value the escapism aspect so much but did the simulational aspect.
I also liked storytelling, but one thing I really learned was cooperative teamwork, investigative skills, and things like that which stood me in good favor later on. I also very much liked it when adventures/scenarios, etc. connected history, mythology, religion, literature and so forth throughout the story. I don’t know how many facts in myth, religion, science, technology and so forth I encountered in early games, or how many times the process worked in reverse (I saw in a game the fantasy or imaginary reflection of a real world event or fact), but the games and culture back then tended to cross-fertilize each other. I like allusions so that was a positive aspect of both entertainment and, for lack of a better term, oblique background education through gaming for me.
How do you feel about the stories that are created through playing? Do you feel a stronger connection to them, or less? Do you feel you're part of its telling, or just an audience member to the DM?
Depending on the story, how well or poorly done and executed, I usually like it better than a film. I consider RPGs an early form of Virtual Reality, which is non-technologically based, rather than mechanical or electronic. I guess you could also call things like RPGs
biologically based Virtual Reality. Because of that I usually feel more connected to such creations than to film, although, if a film or book or some other form of media is very well produced and the story-line excellent then it can have the same effect upon me as with the best games.
DMs: How do you feel about the writing of original plots for DnD? And what drew you to DMing specifically?
I enjoy it and it’s useful. My children are homeschooled and we often use RPGs like that to supplement history education, or learning about myth, or religion, or politics, military affairs, culture. I guess I also like DMing cause I’ve done it for so long and don’t get to play much (though I like to play when I can).
I’ve never used a Pre-generated milieu and rarely use store-bought modules (though some are pretty good). I consider writing ages and designing adventures and missions and scenarios good writing practice as well as an enjoyable challenge at invention. I guess I’m also kind of strategic, and what used to be called “global” in my thinking and way of looking at the world. I like tactics, but ordinarily I’m kind of normally looking at the big problem and so I like seeing a lot of separate, detailed aspects of a thing being shaped to work together efficiently. So I like tinkering with worlds, so to speak.
I don't know if my particular background helped or not but good luck and Godspeed with your paper.
I think I stick with it because there is a lot of variety in the tactical challenges and tools a DM gets to delve into in each playing session. So while I may not get the fun of controlling a character and playing him well enough to advance in level (i.e. winning), the variety of controlling lots of different monsters with lots of different and interesting abilities tends to make up for that.
