It's that time again. Time to defend role-playing games from
the media. Recently in Springfield, Oregon, a tragic shooting
occurred at Thurston High School. With 4 dead by the hands of
Kipland Kinkel, people start looking for reasons. An Associated
Press article said that he played "demonic occult role playing
games". With those few words I was enraged. Once again the media,
uninformed about role playing games, often referred to as RPGs,
put bad images in the mind of the general public. I am here to
correct that image.
We all have done some role playing in our lives; most of it
as simple as a game of cops & robbers, some more complex such as
free form acting. You take the role of a cop and your friend
becomes a robber, your task is simple; stop the robbery. RPGs
take that one step beyond; giving you more structure, a basic
system of rules to base your adventures on. Lets go back to our
example: you, the cop, shoot the robber. The robber says that
you didn't. The rules in an RPG would tell you if you did, based
on the abilities that you have as a cop to be an accurate shooter
compared to the robbers abilities to dodge the bullet. Sometimes
just comparing abilities is easy enough to solve the dispute, such
as the cop being a sharpshooter and the overweight robber trying
to get out of a window. Most RPGs use dice to resolve disputes.
Some use such simple game mechanics such as rock/paper/scissors.
Now lets try and go for a different setting. If you don't
want to be a simple cop and/or robber you can always be a vampire
(Vampire: The Masquerade), werewolf (Werewolf: The Apocalypse),
a cybernetic centaur (Rifts), a manga character in super powered
armor (Bubblegum Crisis), or something as simple as a cartoon
(Toons). The variety of role playing game settings is vast, and
there are even generic games where you can set your own setting,
such as GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System).
Role Playing Games let you use your imagination to take yourself
to another world and be another person. Most people play because of
the social values that you learn in the game. Most of the time you
are the hero trying to correct the nefarious deeds that the evil
villains have perpetrated. You also learn teamwork, thinking
through problems, and trying to talk through problems and not
fighting your way through them.
Do these things make RPGs evil? I think not, I've made many
friends throughout my role playing adventures. Some of those friends
I've kept in contact with for many years. Role playing is also not
something that is just for the younger generation: I, myself, have
been role playing for the last 12 years and have met many gamers that
are in their 40's to 50's who have been role playing longer than I.
It brings out the kids in all of us, taking us back to those times of
playing cops and robbers with childhood friends.