I’ve been very fortunate in finding a group of friends that enjoy role-playing … especially considering my limited experience as a DM. In the early 90’s I bought a D&D Basic Set from a friend of mine and spent many hours pouring over the rulebook, creating characters, and designing worlds .. but I never did manage to play a face-to-face game in those years. Instead I spent a large amount of my time playing CRPGs and adventure games on the computer, so my appreciation of RPGs is definitely shaped by those experiences.

Thanks for writing in. I hope you get the chance to put together a role-playing campaign together some time - I find it deeply rewarding. I’m hoping to write many more articles on role-playing in the future - I didn’t realize that it was still a viable topic!

First of all, I want to sincerely thank the two of you for putting in such deep thought and time on an issue that normally is regarded as trivial by the general public. I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had with my father about Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, or World of Warcraft that revolve around the issue of “wasting time.” I fully plan on forcing him to read both of these articles. He and I both love baseball and the tie in to that sport may help him to see RPGs as another “thinking man’s game.”

Second, I feel the need to once again thank you for bringing such wonderful memories back to me in regards to my sadly short but wonderful experience with D&D. I used to live near a few very close friends who all went to college with or near me. We all studied things like, art, english, or music and seemed to see eye to eye creatively more than any group of people I have spent time with before or since. This lead to some of the most amazing D&D I have ever been a part of. Vast landscapes, epic story lines, and best of all, intricate control over characters, actions, and settings. We all took turns in one way or another being DM over a two year period and it was some of the most fun I have ever had playing a game. In fact one of the guys that I used to play with is responsible for my reading this article.

I am very happy to see people sharing this experience and putting as much thought into this as it deserves.

Thanks again, and you can bet I will be checking back in on both of your sites soon.

Matt

(P.S. This is a comment for Micheal which seems slightly strange….wrong website and all, but anyway: I wanted to say that your article was very clear. I actually stopped reading the comments about a third of the way through because I was so frustrated with how people were responding. Anyway, cheers, and keep up the good work!)

@Keira -
I too share in a passion for story, character development (motivation, personality, etc), and dramatization. We’ve got a *great* group together (4 of us) that run a campaign using a mixture of rules I’ve developed myself, and D&D 3rd Edition. Because the world is so different from the usual fantasy-oriented campaigns, I’ve had to make a lot of stuff up on the spot - and because of that I’m pretty flexible with the rules also. This is met with varying successes - one of the players definitely falls into the “Accountant” camp and is deeply discomforted by any departures from the canon 3rd Edition rulebook.. the another is more of a “Devourer” and attempts to ignore the rules in order to maximize their benefit. I’ve found it difficult yet rewarding to reconcile these two play styles in favor of true “role-play” … and I have noticed that the players (and myself) have transformed our play styles over the last year or so - all for the best. Thanks for the comment!

Maybe my post was misunderstood because I didn’t properly articulate what appreciating the game of baseball means to me and how keeping score activates that for me. Perhaps my real contribution was to put the ball on on a tee so you could hammer it out of the park, which is exactly what you did here.

You manage to properly (and vividly) account for the engagement of a role-player through the conduit of rules. “Phenomenology” is a useful term because, as you suggest, this relationship is complex and personal. It’s what keeps the desire to play alive and growing, in my view.

Thanks for taking the time to think about this so carefully and for putting flesh and blood on my skeleton scorekeeper. I’m truly grateful.

I too am quite ‘consumed by’ roleplaying - I act as a Dungeon/Game Master for a weekly role-playing game that me, my girlfriend, and two friends play. This is my first crack at it, but the sense of personal involvement that we get from playing the game is unlike anything I’ve ever had. It literally is a joint storytelling production.

Thanks again for the response and your excellent clarifications - glad it at least made sense!

I wonder if we couldn’t combine the Accountant and Devourer categories into one; it seems to me that you’re really drawing a distinction here between roleplayers and non-roleplayers. Perhaps there are gamers who sees the game rules as something to be absorbed in (RPer), and others who see them as something to absorb (non-RPer). Or, put another way, a non-RPer’s engagement does not occur on a personal level, but on an abstract one.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. I’ve had roleplaying on the brain recently.