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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5437135" data-attributes="member: 4937">Every small town in the southern United States is convinced it has the best BBQ in the world.  Whether you believe that indeed depends on your milage.  Back at you.Your whole post is one bit of snarky accusation that I'm being arrogant while once again pretending to the moral high ground so that you can freely insult people without thinking of yourself as the insulting kind.Ok, maybe I'll buy the arrogance, I'm prone to do that, but your the one who is claiming special skill - empathy, acting ability, imagination, etc. is incredibly common amongst you and yours.  My claims don't require me to say anything special about myself.  The only trait that I would claim for myself is the ability to see things differently from the way other people see them, and whether first I speak truly and modestly when I say I have that, and whether that is a gift or a curse (or both) I'll leave up to other people to judge.If you want to say that you are incredibly empathetic, theatrical, imaginitive or whatever, then I've no basis or reason for disagreeing with you.  You may well be.  But if you want to say such traits are found commonly, all that does is make you seem like the guy who thinks his small town produces the best BBQ in the world.I didn't say there weren't.  But many is a very imprecise term.  There might be a dozen per hundred thousand and so tens of thousands capable of the feat across the country.  That's alot of people, but not so many that if you go looking for it you'll easily stumble across it.  You see, if the ability were so common, we wouldn't prize it so much when we found it.  The economic value of being a really good actor wouldn't amount to much.  If 10's of thousands of people could throw a perfect spiral out of a three step drop, Peyton Manning wouldn't make nearly as much money.I suppose so.  But for a trait that you claim is so pervasive, it's terribly hard to find a lot of evidence that the talent is put to much use.  Try to find a board on the internet where people excercise that talent to put themselves in the other's shoes and consider each person's opinion carefully more often than they do not.Oh, I agree.Let me relate a story along those lines.  The very best group of RPers I was ever a part of decided to start a new Chill campaign.  So all created investigators.  We ended up with I think a drugged out Jamaican Bush pilot, a dutch pre-teen runaway, a korean martial artist, a Mossad agent, a Central American war journalist, and an Egyptian expert in antiquities.  We met, glanced over each other character sheets, drooled at the possibilities of RP promised therein, confirmed we were covering our skill bases and had enough combat ability, and set down to play.  After some prepratory RP that went quite well, the DM duly revealed our mission - investigate supernatural occurances in a KKK stronghold.  Everyone stopped and stared.  There was one basic problem with our group - everyone had done something that was just a little bit too creative.  We could cover the skills, but none of us had the remotest chance of appearing to be normal.  We had no way to legimately roleplay blending in.  No one knew what to do.  We couldn't even hide out somewhere while sending the 'face' guys in.  The campaign folded after one session, and I learned a valuable lesson both as a player and a DM.Those characters weren't even that 'wacky', and yet, we'd all inadvertently produced a situation that none of us could enjoy.  I've never created a truly original alien race.  I've never published a novel; I've never acted in a play.  I get terrible stage fright in front of strangers.  I'm not a Gordon R. Dickenson or a Dustin Hoffman either.  And I never said that I was.  I've been told I make especially memorable NPCs (and PCs), but I also know that there are some sorts of characters I just can't successfully pull off.And I was far from dismissive of actors and writers generally.  I'm merely trying to point out that even where you'd expect to find it, the ability to get outside of your head is fairly rare.  I can rave about the acting ability John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewert, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Mel Gibson or Denzel Washington.  These are people who can carry a movie by themselves.   And many other names would come to mind.  But no one I think in the movie industry, least of all those actors themselves, would tell you that they are actors with incredible range.  You are never going to mistake them for anyone but themselves, and in every movie they basically play a single persona.  That doesn't make them bad actors, nor am I in any fashion insulting them.  It just means that they don't have the same skill set as Lon Chaney or Dustin Hoffman.  And hooray for variaty.And the same sorts of things can generally be said of writers.  Some have special gifts of wordsmithing.  Some have special gifts of story telling.  Others have special gifts of imagination.  Some have agreeably amounts of all three.  But in the 300+ science fiction stories I've read, maybe a handful have aliens that are anything but humans with a slightly different shape.  Most sci-fi authors, even really good ones, don't even try for more than a pastiche because they above all people know how hard it is.  Get that alien on and off the stage before anyone notices just how single diminsional or unalien it is.You know, if you really believed any of that, you wouldn't have bothered to post.  And if there really is nothing to be said, would it be asking to much for you to not bother saying it?Huh?  Ok, I confess a complete failure of empathy there - I have no idea what you are seeing.</blockquote>

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