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Sun, 16 Feb 2020

Thoughts on the Reality of Fantasy

Starting last year, I suddenly got back into role-playing games after a nearly 25 year hiatus. In college, I played all sorts of RPGs (all this is the tabletop variety, not videogames), and dropped the habit once I got into the "real world," on the presumption that no one would have the time for it.

In any case, I now find myself DMing a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, and playing in another, both of which came together more or less because I waved the "I want to play RPGs" flag on Facebook, and got a huge response.

One of the things that's come to my attention is that we apparently experience events from the games as being in some way real. I have operated on this assumption as I run my game and play in the other, but it had remained an abstract thought until this last weekend.

In the game where I'm a player, my character, Cass, is a 17 year old half-elf who has lived her last ~4 years as a street urchin, after escaping from an abusive home siutation. Half-elves are generally outcasts, being neither fully human nor fully elven. A couple years ago, she realized that she was developing magical powers, the source of which is completely unknown to her. In game-mechanics terms, she's a wild-magic sorcerer, which means that her spellcasting comes from within, and may occasionally spark chaotic, unexpected magical effects.

Critically, she's quite small: under 5' tall, about 90 lbs (with a healthy weight of about 110, which she'll probably reach with sufficient food), and not terribly strong, with a strength score of 8 on a scale of 3-18, where 10 is average.

As I play her in the game, I've been doing what I felt was a reasonaby good job of getting into the mindset of someone who is not at all like me, in temperament, physical presence, or outlook. What would an Ave Rat do? (For readers not from Seattle, Ave Rats are the homeless teens who hang out on the street near the University of Washington campus, colloquially known as "The Ave.")

In yesterday's session, we found ourselves at liberty in a new city in our fantasy world (a homebrew world that my co-DM Jordan and I are creating together). We spotted an urchin who looked like they were being chased, who disappeared into an alley, but no one was chasing them. Curiositiy piqued, Cass followed, but found the dead-end alley empty. Nyx, Cass's friend and fellow street urchin, found a tunnel that they may have disappeared into, and we followed it, popping out into a storeroom. We didn't find anything, but made a mental note that we might want to check it out further.

Later in the day, with fresh mysteries to solve, Nyx and Cass decided to go check out the storeroom again, to try to find any clues our previous urchin may have left behind. At Cass's insistence, we kept the remainder of the party away, so as to be more sneaky and quiet.

Sneaking in was trivial, and once inside, we rolled terrible Stealth rolls, and pretty much immediately someone came to check out the noise. A man unlocked the door and walked in, spotting us as soon as he was in.

With the heart-racing feeling of a cornered animal, Cass darted forward and attempted to hit the man with a shocking grasp attack, which, if it hits, delivers a surprising amount of force -- this is the only spell she's confident she can cast every time. Her plan was to surprise him then dart away down the tunnel, hoping to forestall any attempt to follow them.

The attack missed. The man grabbed her and she squirmed and tried (and failed) to shocking grasp him over and over until he completely immobilized her. He didn't realize what she was trying to do, taking it to be normal attempts to kick or punch rather than a magical attack.

During this time, Nyx fortunately kept her head, and persuasively argued that we weren't trying to steal anything, and had in fact been trying to help the urchin we'd seen before, who seemed to be in distress. Cass was enveloped in a fully-developed fight-or-flight response, and utterly unable to move. The man, and moments later, his boss, were willing to listen to Nyx, and after Nyx tried to calm Cass a bit, set down the struggling girl. Cass and Nyx demonstrated the previously-unsuspected tunnel into the storeroom, and the shop owner took us to her office.

The discussion was brief, and essentially consisted of "Don't break into people's shops, please." She let us go thanks to Nyx's silver tongue, and we were escorted to the store's front door, passing the varied goods present in any general store.

This sequence of events, at the slightest remove, was patently stupid. I, a 40-some year old man, would never, ever act in this way. But in the moment, with my mind placed as firmly as possible into the brain of an imaginary 17 year old street urchin, the choices were clear as day: the man was a threat, she knew she was caught where she wasn't supposed to be, and her only thought was how to escape right now. She was overconfident about her ability to use shocking grasp, sure that it would fire off every time she tried to use it, forgetting that you also have to hit your target for it to work.

After we were released from the shop, Cass was shaking with reaction, the immobilization by the shop hand the absolute worst response he could have made, from her point of view -- it recalled her pre-urchin past, and dropped her into the horrible mental space that called into being. She had to sit down in the street and let it all wash over her for a few minutes, before she could really continue on.

We stopped the session shortly after those events, out of time for the day. I went off to my next event, a friend's birthday party. As I sat waiting for others to arrive, having gotten to the bar early, I realized: I was shaking. Not a lot, but I was not my normal steady-feeling self.

I thought back on the past hour, and realized that I'd also had tensed shoulders as my character was being restrained against her will, and was feeling that shaking even then. I had described the character's physical reactions because I actually felt them in myself. Only an echo of the character's reactions, to be sure, but I felt them. Somehow, I had experienced a trauma trigger reaction even though I, the player, never had the trauma in the first place, and didn't experience the triggering event "for real."

As I self-consciously examine my memories of the event, the mental image of Cass, caught up in the arms of a comparatively burly shop hand is much clearer than the sight of my DM or the other players, at that moment. I don't see through her eyes; it's a disembodied memory, as if I were watching a movie, but the slightly dusty storeroom, his leather apron, Nyx's pleading voice, the sense of mindless, wild-animal panic: these are all more "real" than the reality that was in front of my eyes.

This is hardly a revelation, of course. I linked a study above that suggests empirically that this is all fairly common among RPG players. Even so, it hints at the awesome power latent within role-playing situations. We have the opportunity to become heroes in a way the real world does not offer, except on rare occasions (magical abilties aside, of course). We can experience crushing defeats and bounce back. We can be the people reality doesn't allow us to be.

Dungeons and Dragons is experiencing a resurgence at the moment, and I suspect that an element of that newfound popularity is this very ability to do heroic things that reality denies us. There are many factors, of course, but the chance to experience things that are otherwise unaccessible is surely one of them.

Posted at 18:59 permanent link category: /misc


Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater