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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3015781" data-attributes="member: 18832">My first instinct is to say "No", but I am trying to be more helpful and less confrontational these days.I think it depends on what you mean by "escapist fantasy".I think of myself as a fairly serious roleplayer. I'm really interested in the hobby, I think about it a lot, I've invested a lot of time and energy into it, and it's directly responsible for my having the friends that I have (through joining SUTEKH at the University of Sydney).When I create characters, I give thought to how they think, what they believe, what they do, why they do it, what they want to do in the future. I enjoy the mechanical side of things a lot, but I don't really enjoy roleplaying games as pure exercises in tactical problem-solving and combat.That said, I honestly don't believe that there's a shred of escapism in the collection of motivations for why I enjoy playing D&D, or any other roleplaying game.I don't identify with my characters. They're not "part of me". I don't wish I could be them, or that I could have their lives and adventures. I don't think about what it would be like for me to live in Eberron or the World of Darkness or Reich-5, I think about who my characters are and what life is like for them. I don't play D&D to "get away" from my mundane life.(Sometimes my characters are like me in one way or another, but that's only because sometimes I'm interested in examining those traits from the outside, not to make it easier to get inside the character.)I play D&D (and other roleplaying games) because I enjoy the game elements. Because I enjoy the challenge of creating an interesting character and conveying the picture of that character I have in my head to my fellow players. Because I enjoy taking events, problems, and challenges as the GM presents them to me and trying to reason out what my character would do about them. Because I enjoy the consequences of acting truthfully on my character's thoughts, beliefs, and feelings regardless of whether I, the player, can see that another course of action would be more successful or constructive (though, of course, there's a "filter" of sorts in place to ensure that I don't piss off the other players by making truthful choices for my character that are annoying or damaging to the game we're playing together). Because I enjoy exploring worlds which are unlike our own, inasmuch as they might be interesting achievements in consistent worldbuilding or have something to say about our own world or something else entirely which captures my imagination.I guess I can boil all of this down: I don't play games to pretend that I'm someone else, living another life in a different place. I play games because I like to participate in the creation of stories about other people living their lives in other places. I don't need to be my character to know how they think and what they believe, but I do enjoy creating other people and "navigating" them through their lives.I think I'm probably atypical in all this, and I'm happy to accept that, but I do think it's unfortunate that so many people assume that roleplaying is always about escapism, or identifying with your character, or pretending to be someone else. Better that we understand as a community of gamers that people have different motivations for playing.</blockquote>

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