A role-play-night is very remarkable. It is not comparable with any other game. No other game stays interesting for that long.
And no game is that less understood. Everyone who had to explain it a dozen of times to others will agree on that.
"How do you win?"
"Is it on the computer?"
"Do you have a board to play it on?" The only way to get one to understand is to let one join once.
Understanding why you would do so is even more difficult.
But the insiders can grasp the rules and stuff, but there is more to it. What happens when you start playing is a bit strange and magical. You start dealing with a living being, with whom you will start some kind of relationship. When you really start playing a character, there is a part to it that is not as concrete and understandable as the statistics about him/her.
That is the same point at which role-playing becomes serious and exciting. It's about the same reason people read books, but it goes a bit further. You can create and even play a character!
Some feeling about adventure, real-living fantasy and open fields comes over me when I think of that.
And so, you create someone. I think it is not avoidable that this character is some sort of reflection on you, no matter how far it seems to be. He/she must exist somewhere in your head, otherwise you would never be able to play him/her. We do adapt this a bit to the setting and possibilities and it is one thing we humans are remarkable good at.
Yeah, they form a live of their own, all thanks to the lively imaginations we have. We let some of the countless parts of us come out as a living creature of it's own. We can't really control them anymore, than. They live around just live us, only on another platform of fiction. If you want to get real philosophical, you could ask yourself if we really are on the highest platform, or also are 'played' on another platform.
After all, you can get on a deeper fictive platform also. Your fantasy-characters can also make up fantasy-characters. And those can also make up fantasy-characters.
My bard Jonathan and the gnome Fombel once made a dummy of straw, put it on a goat and used the spell 'ventriloquism' to give him a voice. It was 'the Knight of the Goat' and Jonathan later wrote down the legend of him. From his point of view, his world was the real one and 'the Knight of the Goat' was just a dummy that they fantasized about. But that's just what we think.
Well, I do not really believe we are on one of those platforms, myself, though I know from experience you can have more fictional platforms in different degrees of fiction. And thinking like this makes you realize that we do create other worlds and make them as believable as possible. We think as much around it as possible, being a sort of copy of our world, so that our characters really can live on their own platform.
So that is what we do with role-playing.
But why is that so fascinating? Well, much more like other games, you can really become someone else in another world. You can loose yourself for a moment and see all from a new perspective. A whole other life, much more free. And because your characters are real persons, it is very interesting and fascinating to watch. They can create special friendships, get special feelings or interests and do pretty weird stuff.
Life on such a platform can be as real and funny and everything as live is for us, because we put all we know in our imagination. And that's fascinating and that's role-playing.
But this all is kind of hard to explain when again someone asks you what rpg actually is. So, for such an occasion, telling it's on the computer or a game-board is quite acceptable.
The listener will probably not believe it since you do it so many times and think you are lying because you are involved in some criminal organization, but o well, at least it will seem that you have a life.

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