Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sir Elton" data-source="post: 1726867" data-attributes="member: 14486">you didn't understand what I meant, did you?  This is what I mean.  Reality is an escape from Roleplaying.   Take the case of the stereotypical house wife reading a Gothic Novel.  Most people think she's escaping the humdrum of her life.  Not so.  The same with Roleplaying.  When we play a roleplaying game, we take on the persona of someone who gets into very dangerous situations: fighting orcs, climbing on the trellis, facing down demons, and even get involved in the occasional bar brawl.  Once you identify with your character, you are putting yourself through terrible tension: an ordeal of fear, uncertainty, and possible mistrust, pain, and betrayal.   A happy ending, where the heroes vanquish the Evil Bad Dude, comes as a relief of all that tension.  Reality is an escape from all that, since in real life we don't put ourselves through obvious dangerous situations.  People who call Roleplaying escapist, and play, hasn't really identified with their character.  Roleplaying, done properly, is an intense activity.  After it is all said and done, Reality is a welcome escape from all that.  Many times, when I read a novel, I felt myself identifying with some of the characters.  When I read The Lost World, I found myself in Malcolm's shoes.   Experiencing everything that Malcolm, the Chaos Mathematician, experienced in the Lost World.  After reading the book, I breathed a sigh of relief and I felt better that in Reality, demonic dinosaurs don't exist and they aren't rampaging around eating people (okay, that's from the Movie, not the book).  Reality is an escape from Roleplaying, if everyone playing the game has properly done their job in entertaining each other.  Being an unwashed human being is a matter of personal choice; unable to get a girl to say "yes, I'll go out with you," is a matter so complex that Chaos Theory is used to explain it.  Being unable to move out of your parents' home is also a complex situation more dealing with inflation, our use of fossil fuels, and the national economy.  Believe me, I know.</blockquote>

Verification