Things we get out of roleplaying

[johndallman]

So, I tried to do some summarising, and it's hard, because there's a lot of slippery concepts here that shade into each other.

But the thing that stands out is being someone else, and that someone being significant: being someone who does things that matter, has tales told about her outside the game, and maybe inside the game, if that makes sense. Being a hero, in several senses of the term. We have a lot of variation in emphasis on different aspects of that, but it seems to be the core thing we get out of role-playing.

Socialising is also significant: more so for me than I realised until I read these postings closely.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

The parkour thing is interesting.

Because do you need parkour as a thing in the game rules? More importantly, do you need parkour as a thing in the character creation game rules?

Or can you do it with just having skills like Acrobatics and Climbing, or Jumping and Climbing, or all three, which have been traditional to have in RPGs for a long time? Does that produce the effect?

Not being one of the people to whom it seemed important, I couldn't say. To me it seems obvious that you build it out of athletic abilities and training in their use. What I didn't understand was why it seemed so important to the people who were interested in it. To me, it seems like a way of getting places in a city very fast: the looking really cool aspect doesn't mean much to me, since it doesn't have much actual effect on the events of the game.

I think I will try asking a friend who's very much into cinematic roleplaying: so much so that his homebrew combat system is actively confusing to people who don't visualise the scene in terms of camera angles.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

• Occasionally, a relaxing fight.

My cinematic friend seems to find the relaxing fights important. He works in management consultancy: after having been subjected to a few hours of that on Friday, I'm starting to understand his view on that a bit better.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by johndallman

What I didn't understand was why it seemed so important to the people who were interested in it. To me, it seems like a way of getting places in a city very fast: the looking really cool aspect doesn't mean much to me, since it doesn't have much actual effect on the events of the game.

This might fall under the "playing someone who's really good at something" category. RPGs generally support combat in much more detail than other things; if I'm playing a spaceship pilot, say, I like to have a system that requires me the player to make decisions, as well as letting the character's abilities influence the results of the actions that flow from those decisions. (E.g. I don't want to come down to just a contest of skills and hardware, like classic D&D melee combat.) If I felt strongly about parkour, I might well want a similar level of rules support for that.