Would you leave your life behind?

[Rahkan]

(Maybe the thing that is extra special about the magical portal to fantasy land is that you don't feel and responsibility -- after all, you could not say goodbye or visit if you wanted too. if you leave in this very real world, you know they they/she/he ar/is out there, suffering because you disappeared without a trace. Just a thought.)

I don't know, except my cat, the only people who would really be shattered by my dissappearance are my brother and parents. I don't have a girlfriend but even if I did (this being High School) eventually we'd break up and never see each other again. I like my friends fine, but when I go to college we'll keep in contact for a time and forget each other. My parents would anyway have to get used to my absence when I went off to college, we'd only see each other once a year or so anyway (my parents see their parents even less often) and my brother and me aren't incredibly close. He'd feel loss in an abstract way that I was gone, but not soul-shattering loss. I'd just leave them all a detailed note, they might not like it and my parents would definitely be sad. But they'd be sad about me leaving home anyway.

The only bonds I'd have a hard time dropping would be if I had children under 18, or a woman I loved.

As for real life? I don't know. There is adventure out there I know, and I've thought about grasping it. But thats years in the future and in the end I don't know if I'd have the courage to just go out and travel just like that. Too often its easy to just fritter away an opportunity. In this case I could just say yes, and it would happen.

 

[Buttercup]

No one should have nothing to leave behind.

With all due respect, who are you to say what other people should have in their lives? Perhaps some folks like having no close connections. Families are not all pink and rosey and softly scented like in a Disney movie. Some of them are horrible.

I'm even surprised people can ADMIT they have nothing to leave behind without feeling horrible (apparently, at least, they are able to do so).

Let me tell you something. I have no blood family left. They're all dead. I'm fortunate to have a husband I love, but he's older than me, and since men don't live as long as women anyway, I'm looking into a future of widowhood, most likely. And if that day should come, I'll be heartbroken, and I'll be alone, but I sure as frickin hell won't be ashamed. Instead I'll remember him fondly for all the days of my life.

 

[Reynard]

As for real life? I don't know. There is adventure out there I know, and I've thought about grasping it. But thats years in the future and in the end I don't know if I'd have the courage to just go out and travel just like that. Too often its easy to just fritter away an opportunity. In this case I could just say yes, and it would happen.

Hey, I am right there with you. I sometimes feel like I failed by not grasping that youthful exuberance and optimism and just going for *it*. Hell, I wanted to be the world's first real live Batman. Granted, as you get older you learn some things about life and about yourself, but it still sits there, in backgrounds. Maybe not Batman, but what about and FBI agent? That sort of thing. All I know is that I feel a great deal of love for and responsibility to my wife, and whatever choices I made for us in the past are still present, and would be so even if Mr Magic popped into my room at night and offered me a world. And I am okay with that.

However, if I was still young, yet I knew what I would feel like thinking of the "woulda coulda shouldas", wel... lets just say that if someone gave me the opportunity to pop back to any point in my *real* life, but retain all the knowldge I have now, that I would do in a heartbeat.

 

[Furn_Darkside]

You have to have a g/f first to get a fiancee, right?

There are mail order catalogs to get around that kind of thing...

FD

 

[Umbran]

Hey, I am right there with you. I sometimes feel like I failed by not grasping that youthful exuberance and optimism and just going for *it*. Hell, I wanted to be the world's first real live Batman.

I'm reminded of a song, by a wonderful group called Ookla the Mok

They have a song entitled "My Secret Origins". It's a lament about how waiting for all those wonderful fantasy things never really gets you very far.

Lyrics can be seen here, though on this one they didn't seem to believe in paragraphs.

A RealPlayer sound bite can be found here, along with sound bites of other songs on the same album.

 

[Tiefling]

I'm pretty close to my family, but to be honest, they don't mean as much to me as that kind of opportunity. The path of my life will probably be that I'll go to college, get a job as a computer programmer, be pretty successful and retire a little early. Then I do meaningless stuff until I die.

Military? I've got moderate exercise induced athsma, and I resent the whole "We will break down your personality with a strict regimen of yelling and bed-making, then rebuild it from the ground up until you are a mindless, unquestioning machine" thing. The peace corp? Building schools and wells is... not adventure. Police? Academics? I'm not even going to explain why that's not adventure. Exploring jungles just doesn't sound fulfilling to me either.

 

[pseudo_hero]

Well Said Tiefling. The adventure of the real world just dosn't compare to fantasy adventure. Even if your set upon by nasty middle eastern terrorists while building the school. They are still human, you know what a gun does. All you have is fear for your life. Replace the school with a village your helping to rebuild with your magic, and the terrorists with some Drow, now we're talkin adventure!

 

[clark411]

While it would sound very tempting, I know that I'd go to this fantasy world and end up sitting at a table with an elven wizard, half orc barbarian, dwarf fighter, and halfling rogue- and we'd be playing an RPG called Dollars and Democracies or something.


"Krunk want to invest in Pork Futures."
"Skill (Investment) Check please."
"Daft orc, Gold is the only option!"
"Psst, as they argue, I pick pocket them."
"I'll cast Augury to see what's best."
"You can't do that in this campaign!"
"Sigh." <-- me

 

[Celtavian]

RE

It might be fun. That would be a hard choice. Give up easy living in America for hard and dangerous living in a fantasy world where death, pain and suffering are real. Hmmm. That would be a hard choice.

No toothpaste. The dead walk. Bad sanitary habits. The dead walk. No showers. The dead walk. Hard work days on farms or dangerous patrols against orcs. The dead walk. Dragons exist and might possibly wipe out whole towns. The dead walk.

I just don't know. A D and D fantasy world would be a bit much for me I think. If I had been raised there, then I might be able to handle the differences between the modern world and the fantasy world.

I believe that if you could ever do something like this, you would end up in a Fantasy world governed by real physical laws rather than rules simulations. Though magic would be powerful, few if any could withstand the might of a powerful dragon attacking.

You would also have to ask yourself am I peasant or a powerful person. Odds are that if you aren't much in the real world, you really aren't going to be much in the game world. Now, if I had the opportunity to be one of my characters with their full array of abilities and knowledge, then that might be a different story.

 

[Agamon]

Damn, no way! I'm the DM of my favorite RPG world, and I know the hell that place is soon going to go through. I think I'll stay here and imagine it and play it out rather than live (and likely die) it.