With the sudden increase in RPGs that I actually play in (as opposed to run), and partly inspired by Navdi’s recent blog posts, I’ve started to wonder what on Earth do role-playing games offer me as a player. I know what I enjoy when I’m running a game, but what about playing? I’m not one of those people who really gets under his character’s skin – immersion might happen, but in a shallow capacity. I blame the endless years of GMing for this – I am constantly ready to hop out of my character’s shoes and into the shoes of another and willing to bend my character to suit the needs of the story. As a player, I don’t play games to solve mysteries and not really care about epic stories about the fates of the worlds because of the epic storyness of theirs. So, what do I like?

This applies to both being a GM and a player, but I love that social situation of gaming. Seeing friends, chatting with them, having fun. Gaming is pretty much the only opportunity I have to see some people these days (being over 30 is tough on schedules), so I cherish that. It’s not uncommon for a game session to start an hour or more later than originally planned because we’ve been trading rumors and just chit-chatting about our lives and the latest cat video on YouTube. The groups I’m a part of tend to have a very loose and casual atmosphere even after the gaming has begun- when something happens in the game that can be commented from the sidelines, it probably will be, either instantly or right after the scene has played out. No matter how serious the game gets, it’s not uncommon for people to step out of the situation, make a verbal footnote about what’s going on, and then return to whatever dreadful thing is happening. This might sound like we’re not taking the games seriously, but it maybe just the opposite – we’re paying attention to the details (and the intertextuality that’s common to our games – we do a lot of referencing) and being responsive on a different level. I can imagine it being highly disruptive to a person not used to the style, and feel a bit sorry towards those who have recently started playing in our regular group.

Sort of related to the previous point is the fact that I’m used to playing games. I’ve been running/playing RPGs two thirds of my life now. And I’m a creature of habit if nothing else. It’s something that we do, and have always been doing. And on some nights, that alone feels like a good enough reason to keep on doing it. Luckily, this is a feeling I get only quite rarely, but I admit, it’s still there.

When actually playing, I’ve noticed that I love three things – building my character’s story, playing (with) the system and observing others from the sidelines.

The first is probably the most important one. I might not immerse myself into my character, but he’s still the most important thing for me in the game. A good analogue might be likening it to the situation in a writer’s process where “the character starts to live a life of its own”, doing decisions that might surprise your own planning and the story starts to unfold on its own to directions you didn’t originally think of. To oversimplify – Inside the game world, I only care about what happens to my character and how his story plays out. I get a glitter of happiness in my eyes when my character faces situations where he has to make difficult choices, when he fails in things, when he is forced to come face to face with things that he has done. When he makes the wrong choices that I know as a player will come haunt him later on, when he is shown the error of his ways and given the opportunity to change. When he resists the temptations in front of him twice, only to succumb to them the third time, when the results might be the most catastrophic. These are things that allow me to build an interesting narrative about the character that can be told later.

Of course, when I said that only my character’s story matters in the game world, it doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of an island or a lone wolf – in games with groups of characters, the most important people in my character’s story are the other players’ characters. And enabling them to play out their stories helps me play out mine. Also if the game’s story is about epic heroes saving all of creation from the threats from beyond, then that is a part of the character’s story as well. But like I said from the start, the epic story itself isn’t something that I look for in games. Its the personal story of which the epic might be a part of. Same goes with solving mysteries of the universe – if the characters solve that mystery and my character learns something about himself while they do that, it’s great. Solving mysteries for mysteries’ sake isn’t really interesting.

One of the best old game sessions I remember playing was a Marvel Superheroes game where our characters were debating for most of the game session about what they were going to do next. My character was mostly just sitting in his chair, listening, through the long long discussion. And then at some point just flies away, not saying a word, not actually coming back to the game for a few game sessions. Might have looked like nothing much for the other players, but there was a lot going on – the character had just fought his father, defeating him. The rest of the group was discussing things that riffed with that part of his story quite awesomely. And the decision to get the hell away from them was very good step for the character’s development, and it was a very cool game session for me. Even if my character didn’t really get to “do anything”. It’s not far from immersion, but not the same thing.

The second thing I love in game situations comes from my engineering background I guess. I like mechanical aspects of the systems. I can play freeform and get a lot from it, but if someone gives me a 600 page rulebook, I’ll embrace that and become a rules lawyer if necessary. I know what you’re thinking – “God, he’s a munchkin…” but it’s not really that. If the game has set some rules about how things work, I like to use the system to build a character the way I want it to play out. If I want to play a character who is really scary, I use the system to make my character that. Or if I want to create a fighter who jumps around and does all sorts of Errol Flynn stuff, I’ll choose things from the mechanics that allow me to do that. And I when I say I can become a rules lawyer, it is usually to protect the vision I have of what the character can do.

A sad example of such a behavior on my part comes from our old d20 Future game, where I played a grizzled heavy weapons expert who was augmented with “cybernetic stuff” (that’s a technical term) and thus near impossible to bring down without actually killing him. Game mechanics-wise he had a lot of powers that allowed him to keep on going even when affected by various negative conditions (to keep him going), carry stuff (I had this vision of him carrying his wounded comrades from battle while the firefights was still going on), etc. And when the GM tried to keep the story flowing into the direction he wanted to while it conflicted what I wanted from the character, I could get pretty annoying to protect what my character was.

As the previous example shows, what I seem to be incredibly bad at, is communicating my intentions of what I want to do with my character to the GMs. I guess in part that is because I start to realize it myself only after playing a few games and getting to know the character myself. The character really builds only after he’s had to made some decisions and shown some personality, not immediately after I step in his shoes or create his statistics..

Also, worth mentioning is that sometimes the things that I emphasize in the system system side aren’t the things that I actually use in the game. I’m one of those strange people who get a kick out of playing the character who is the greatest swordsman of all times, but has sworn never to unsheathe his sword again. When you have to consider a decision to draw it or not just makes every armed conflict more interesting.

The third enjoyable in-game thing for me is that I like watching other people play. I’ve been running games for such a long time that it’s my second nature to lean back and look what the others are doing and how they’re having fun. Hard to really expand on this beyond just that basic idea. Looking at people playing is fun. I’ve been in games where my character has died halfway through the session so I haven’t had a chance to play for the rest. I’ve been to games where I haven’t had a character – I’ve just come in to sit and observe. Anything can be a spectator sport if you like it enough. Even RPGs.

So, that’s me and some thoughts what I’m getting out of gaming. I would like to ask you what do you get out of playing RPGs? Why do you do it? What’s cool about it? If you’re a player in one of my game groups, I’m especially interested.