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A strange reflection
Dec. 7th, 2007 04:10 pmFor the last two or three months I've been part of a regular roleplaying group, my first real one, with the GamesMaster one of my friends and the other players some of his friends who I've now gotten to know (Unrelated note: I've been part of roleplaying groups in the past but each time they haven't lasted past one or two sessions. Turns out it's fairly difficult to get a successful group off the ground)
First of all, roleplaying is completely awesome. It's a semi-structured but very social activity, so I get plenty of social interaction without most of the drawbacks of unstructured socialising. And roleplaying is also quite an intellectual activity, at least the way our group does it. Some of the things we've done so far include trying to work out how a powerful evil wizard managed to get his tower blown up with him in it and trying to come up with a workable plan for a single one of our characters to sneak into an entire city of orcs and get some hostages back out with her. It really does exercise your analytical thinking.
And finally there's the character development, both for your own character and for the others. And in the course of my own character's development I'm finding a few of my own blind spots that I wasn't aware of. For example, my near-complete inability to go for direct confrontation as a first option. Every time it's been a valid option for my character I've missed it purely because that course of action doesn't occur to me naturally. The aforementioned sneaking into an orcish city could have been circumvented if I'd just marched up to the front gate and *demanded* the hostages back, our GM informed us afterwards
I kind of hope that as I continue with this I'll learn to force myself to think in strange and unexpected ways for the sake of my character, and in turn be able to reverse-engineer it to real life.
First of all, roleplaying is completely awesome. It's a semi-structured but very social activity, so I get plenty of social interaction without most of the drawbacks of unstructured socialising. And roleplaying is also quite an intellectual activity, at least the way our group does it. Some of the things we've done so far include trying to work out how a powerful evil wizard managed to get his tower blown up with him in it and trying to come up with a workable plan for a single one of our characters to sneak into an entire city of orcs and get some hostages back out with her. It really does exercise your analytical thinking.
And finally there's the character development, both for your own character and for the others. And in the course of my own character's development I'm finding a few of my own blind spots that I wasn't aware of. For example, my near-complete inability to go for direct confrontation as a first option. Every time it's been a valid option for my character I've missed it purely because that course of action doesn't occur to me naturally. The aforementioned sneaking into an orcish city could have been circumvented if I'd just marched up to the front gate and *demanded* the hostages back, our GM informed us afterwards
I kind of hope that as I continue with this I'll learn to force myself to think in strange and unexpected ways for the sake of my character, and in turn be able to reverse-engineer it to real life.
