What aspect of Roleplaying Games has had the biggest effect on you?
For day seven--and this has been one quick week to be sure, two more weeks of vacation and then it's back to work for me--we have a very interesting question. My response is that roleplaying, among other things, has taught me to be more open to making new friends. This goes both for online and in person. If you want to play you need to have players, and preferably one of those players needs to be GM. I'm going to paint with a broad brush here, but quite a few of us RPG enthusiasts are naturally introverts. That makes it a lot harder to get a new group together. As a kid I ran games for my brother and his friend. I later latched on to a gaming group right after graduating high school. These were friends of friends that eventually became friends with me--but in every case, I had never gone in "cold". My friends and I played for years and years when our schedules meshed up well enough. Some of the guys were more outgoing than others, but for the most part we were a closed group, and nobody got in...especially not girls, and nobody wanted in...especially not girls. I was well into my 20's before I got over my shyness and most of the credit for that goes to my wife. Surprisingly, all the guys have been married at least once at this point, but it was touch and go there for a while. As an aside, I'll never bad talk RPGs. I've been playing literally 30+ years now, but if there is one drawback to playing, it is that even today for the most part it's all male. So, single guys need to beware and single girls need to recruit more female players. I intend to teach my daughter to play as soon as she's old enough. To go by the nightmare stories that I've read in blogs, I've been lucky with new people. There has been only one encounter wherein a friend of a friend brought a guy over to a session and he was totally racist. I'll never forget him because he looked like the lost Ramone and he was just going nuts. Slur after slur, and not in a locker room "this guy's a jerk, but he's kind of endearing" kind of way either. He was ugly both literally and figuratively, but we're going to talk about positives.
I teach English to ESL high school boys in the United Arab Emirates. I won't go into great detail about this because we are, as I said, trying to stay positive--two weeks and they drag me back in!! You can probably guess that among my RPG playing group of friends I was the only one who decided to seek his fortune abroad. When I arrived I had a hard time finding anybody to play with. My fellow newly arrived teachers wanted nothing to do with it, and weren't even open to giving it a go just to humor me.I did try to play a little with my students; small group of guys, interactive storytelling and interesting dice to roll? We had a shot, but they were more for roll playing instead of role playing. Once they were bored of the polyhedrals I had to drop it. I still wanted to play, and I knew it would mean going in 'cold'. I remembered that it was the internet age and I started looking there. I was surprised to find that right here in the middle of nowhere--relatively speaking as Abu Dhabi and Dubai are actually world renowned, I'm the one who lives in the sticks--that there was a very active group of players on Facebook called the Gulf Roleplaying Community. It turned out to be a very diverse group with expatriates from many different countries and even a few locals. It was shocking. I've been a member of the group for five years now and it hasn't ceased to amaze me that so many from the Middle East are engaged in RPGs that aren't rocket propelled grenades.Even more shocking is that there are a fair amount of female players and even GMs. This past May I played my first live table with a female GM. She went all out with terrain and everything. These are friends that I would have never met if not for a shared love of RPGs. Love of playing > Fear of strangers.
Isn't this the way we all learned how to RPG...or was it just me?
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