The icebreaker for this year's #RPGaDay gives us all a warm, fuzzy feeling inside: "What do I love about RPGs?"
Start with a kid who loved setting up the backyard army men battles than thinking about playing them through.
Delve into the pseduo-fantasy world of APBA and Dice Baseball as a pre-teen.
Then finally introduce me to The Hobbit and D&D almost in the same month in early Junior High. Instantly hooked.
Playing Pretend: It is what we do, after all. Whether it's Critical Role's voice actors, an improv troupe, or a bunch of dudes using a scientific calculator to figure out a mecha's charge damage, we're no more professional than my kids playing with Barbies.
Creativity: I'm not going to write the Great American Novel anytime soon, but RPGs are an outlet for my creative ambitions. Sure, I'm still outright grabbing a ton of material from various sources. My kid's Pulp Egypt game has been scenarios I've found from pretty awesome blogs (and I always try to cite the inspiration) and I've compiled an entire Savage Rifts campaign based on old war comics I read as a kid, to to take those ideas, turn them into my own (sometimes turning them on their head) and let them evolve in world building is entirely satisfying.
World Building: Yeah, I love graph and hex paper just like every other 40+ male whose played D&D for decades. Sue me. But world building isn't populating butchers in towns, random boundaries, and putting hobgoblins in some ecologically unstable lair. I'll be covering it a few times this month, but I love watching a world evolve past by my original concepts, and even outside the influence of the PCs.
Whether it's a long running D&D campaign, or some odd characters showing up at a Texas Roadhouse (with beloved recurring NPC), RPGs stimulate my brain, give me an outlet for some creative endeavors I wouldn't otherwise get to use, and it's simply fantastic fun for a bunch of friends, old or just met at the convention table five minutes ago.
Start with a kid who loved setting up the backyard army men battles than thinking about playing them through.
Delve into the pseduo-fantasy world of APBA and Dice Baseball as a pre-teen.
Then finally introduce me to The Hobbit and D&D almost in the same month in early Junior High. Instantly hooked.
Creativity: I'm not going to write the Great American Novel anytime soon, but RPGs are an outlet for my creative ambitions. Sure, I'm still outright grabbing a ton of material from various sources. My kid's Pulp Egypt game has been scenarios I've found from pretty awesome blogs (and I always try to cite the inspiration) and I've compiled an entire Savage Rifts campaign based on old war comics I read as a kid, to to take those ideas, turn them into my own (sometimes turning them on their head) and let them evolve in world building is entirely satisfying.
World Building: Yeah, I love graph and hex paper just like every other 40+ male whose played D&D for decades. Sue me. But world building isn't populating butchers in towns, random boundaries, and putting hobgoblins in some ecologically unstable lair. I'll be covering it a few times this month, but I love watching a world evolve past by my original concepts, and even outside the influence of the PCs.
GAH!! August already! I'd seen when you posted the questions last week and had through about them and tried to start coming up with some responses and then promptly forgot about them all until this morning. I didn't get much response on my own blog last year, so I'm probably just going to post them on a Facebook group I run for the friends I actually game with and maybe I'll share those here as well (hope that's okay!?)...
ReplyDeleteFor me... I guess I love the creativity involved... escape into flights of fantasy... an outlet for my imagination - more so that just regular board gaming (which I tend to do more of these days...).
Also the social aspect. Through role-playing games I have met most of my dearest and oldest friends. I don't really I go out for beers to meet up and catch up with people, but I can sometimes get them together for a game or two (though, again, it's more often board games these days).
The miniatures... I love miniatures. It was actually the miniatures that drew me into Dungeons & Dragons. I love painting and collecting and imagining the stories behind them and the adventure they might partake on (even if I never actually ever get to use them in the game).
In my mind I often include miniature gaming in with role-playing. I've never been a "competitive" miniature gamer and always kind of saw it as role-playing on a (usually) grander scale... the narrative of the scenario being played was more interesting than winning or losing.