Casting Shadows

Today’s #RPGaDay Question:

What aspect of RPGs has influenced you the most?

I doubt I would have been able to identify or accept this about myself as a younger person, but friendship has been the most precious thing to me in life. Perhaps it is the fact that friendship is a choice, and you have to earn it.

Those elements, decision-making and merit, are important to me as a gamer, too. 

That younger me didn’t start gaming to make friends. That was an unexpected benefit of the communication and interaction the games required of him. He started gaming for the ability to take action in a fictional environment, making his own way through a world that could see and hear him the way he saw it, in his imagination. Gaming was so much better than simply reading books.

Looking back now, it is amazing to me the difference wrought on me by the simple acts of description, cooperation, and decision-making in games.

The thing about RPGs that has influenced me the most is just that. It afforded me the opportunity to discover and develop communication skills which I would otherwise have allowed to remain dormant; the vehicle of character and imagined worlds providing the enticement and the context for interaction that real life absurdly lacked for all the quiet normality of my upbringing.

How about you? What aspect of RPGs has had the most influence on you?

#RPGaDay

Tomorrow’s Question:

Hardcover, softcover, or digital?