NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2445058" data-attributes="member: 18832">I'd just like to applaud the existence of any discussion which deals with the fact that roleplaying != "pretending to be someone else".The immersive/escapist/idealised-self/persona-assumption corner of the hobby is too often viewed as the "one true way to roleplay". I've seen scores of people assert that if you're not pretending to be someone else you're not roleplaying, and it's clearly garbage.I draw a distinction between "immersion" and "actor stance", though. I often play in actor stance - I'll change my speech patterns, put on an accent, speak in-character. I don't do this all the time, but then stance isn't about the one single way you do it. Rare is the player who spends all of his time in one stance, and the best habitual actor stance and immersive player I know will often break actor stance to explain actions rather than stand up and perform them, or even to explain his motivations - a very authorial sort of thing to do.I would go so far as to say that I'm not convinced that immersive play is necessarily a worthy goal for many players. I'm not suggesting that it's unhealthy or lame, merely that prevailing wisdom misleads many players who would have a more rewarding experience playing in a different mode into believing that only through immersion - pretending that they are their character - can they truly roleplay.After all, there's more than a few words' difference between "Do what you would do if you were your character" and "Do what your character would do." I think it's a difference larger than many players realise.(Naturally, I lean towards "Do what your character would do." There's no element of self-identification or persona assumption in how I play - it's more like I'm telling the other players how this person (that I know better than anyone else at the table) would react in this situation.)</blockquote>

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