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_refugee_  ·  3388 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you feel about Forum Role-Playing Games?

It's not something I would partake in any more. In general I have lost interest in role-playing activities as a whole (D&D, etc). I have friends that are very involved with role-playing, LARP was big among a social circle to which I used to belong.

They spend so much of their actual life trying to make their fictional characters fictionally learn and succeed at things. They get stressed in real life over the fictional successes of their fictional plots. They spend so much time trying to make their fictional characters fictionally better, gaining fictional accomplishments. They pretend to be other people so they do not have to be themselves, but maybe if they spent some of their time working at improving their actual selves and actually learning skills and so on, they would not want so desperately to escape their lives.

They were an extreme set of people to be sure, and not all were like that. But if I am going to choose between earning a skill level in herbal lore through investing XP, or actually reading about herbs until I gain some basic knowledge, I would prefer to do the latter.

I know that RP have their benefits that you can't have IRL - like, I will never have magic powers or so on, and I know that that can be fun for people to pretend as a result. I do get that, I get that for some people it's not an obsession and it's just a fun release like reading is for me. I suspect my RP disconnect is similar to my disconnect from gambling: I would rather know I have money in my hand than spend that money in my hand on the chance that later it will bring me more money. For some people, both work and are enjoyable.