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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9675353" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'm not "letting" anything. It's simply my nature.I literally cannot mentally do that. I am not cognitively capable of doing that. I will always know that it is just as you say, a pretense.I also don't see the game as gambling, as I've already said--and I hate gambling anyway. There is a reason you have (almost certainly) seen me say, "If I were a gambling man (which I'm not)" or some variation thereof. I don't do gambling. Gambling messes me up on multiple fronts. Those who wish to participate, more power to them, but for me it's an emphatic Big No, Do Not Want.Nnnnnnope. Even if I could somehow white-knuckle my way through it and not have it have some kind of negative effect in the moment, it would, guaranteed, 100% never be something I would laugh about later. Frankly, even just imagining something like that happening is stressful. If the story were told at all, it wouldn't be by me, and I'd be taking steps to stay calm and not let the emotions overcome my better judgment.Doing this as one post since it's a related thing.When I roleplay, I am investing part of my self into the character. That's why, for example, I genuinely find it impossible to play a truly unrepentant evil character for anything but a very brief time (maybe a single session at most). I can get away with it with NPCs, because even the most vile NPC isn't going to be getting spotlight time for most of a given session, let alone session after session after session. I can keep my distance. But anything I'm actually playing most of the time, long-term? Yeah, I'm putting some of what I am into that character. If I don't do that, I can't meaningfully roleplay them. That level of investment, of "immersion" (knowing that word is often over-used), for me, requires that I remove some of the barrier between "myself" and "the character". Running an utterly divorced mental model of the character would be cold, sterile, mechanical. Like trying to pilot one of those "made to look like a real human" robots that sets off all sorts of uncanny-valley stuff--it just wouldn't work, not for me. Or if that analogy doesn't work for you, it would be like asking an author to craft a novel about a concept they feel nothing about and have no knowledge of nor connection to, other than academic journal articles on the subject--sure, they might be able to produce a string of words that follows English grammar and is printed on bound pages of paper, but it wouldn't be "a novel" in any of the ways that actually matter.(Incidentally, the same goes for all of my creative work. I can't make things I don't feel at least a little inspired about, and if I'm inspired, I'm putting some of myself into them. I cannot not invest when I am creating, not if the created product is to have any quality whatsoever. This primarily applies to prose and poetry, but it affects anything I create.)I certainly understand that not everyone will approach things that way. I don't understand how, but my understanding is irrelevant to whether it works for others. But telling me to divest is...like telling an artist to stop caring about the work they make. That you could make anything at all if you just stopped caring about what you create. I can't do that; it's not an unwillingness to make the choice, it is that that simply isn't a choice I am capable of making.</blockquote>

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