Why People Play Role Playing Games (RPGs)

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Barry Osser from North Coast Role Playing in Eureka, California and I’m here to kind of wrap up the days work on role playing. Now you kind of know the basic history and you know more in depth about Dungeons and Dragons than any of the others, but you’ve got an idea about the history of role playing. You’ve probably at this point learned how to build your character, what the attributes are, how to generate those attributes and you’ve got a basic idea of what’s going to be entailed for being the game master and the players, and what kind of investment in time and resources you’re going to have as a role player. So the big question becomes, why should I do this crazy role playing thing? Well for me, the reason is escape and I don’t mean something insane, I mean something pretty basic. I go to the movies to be entertained, I read books to be entertained, I watch television to be entertained and this is another form of entertainment, if you think in terms of the bard or the poet that use to travel a thousand, two thousand years ago from place to place, that individual made his money by telling stories. Homer has for the Greeks the Odyssey and the Iliad, these are giant collections of stories that Homer would go from door to door and he would get food and trade for telling stories, of course there wasn’t a lot of television back in those days, so you had to have something that would focus people. To me the greatest forward step in story telling has been role playing. So in the case of role playing, you’ve got a system where there are more than one story teller, there’s a collection of story tellers giving you that story. But the game master has got only a part of the story teller job, the players are a big part of it as well, the game master is setting world, the game master runs everything around them, but the players when you’re reading a book, when you’re watching a movie, when you’re watching TV, you’ve got an individual or collection of individuals that you’re watching and the world kind of goes around them, that’s the game masters part. The player’s part is to tell the story of those specific characters that our eye or the camera’s eye is focused on. So you’ve got a two part deal to create a story telling setting that’s a lot of fun, something that you can enjoy as time goes on and this is really the part that I enjoy. I get a collection of people around me that have different backgrounds, actually my current group I can tell you that we’ve got a number of people in law enforcement, I’ve also got a person who’s working in garbage disposal, I’ve got a teacher, I’ve got a park ranger and it’s an eclectic mix of people, but we all have the same desire, the same need to kind story tell and enjoy that story telling and I really love it and its your ability to get the chance to meet different people and kind of see what makes them tick because if you’re just going to a poker game or you’re just going out bowling chances are you’re not going to get in real deep with a person, but boy when you are there matching wits with a dragon who’s just basically burn to death half of your party and you and the other 3 characters who are left are trying to figure out what to do, that’s really where the metal of the man is made. Enjoy role playing it’s a lot of fun. "