Because they add a much needed social and creative outlet. I'm the kind of person who will, often, sit around by themselves all day and speak very little. And a lot of the time, I'm okay with that. But even I want to and need to be social sometimes and games give me a very organized and comfortable way for me to do that. I'm never going to go to a bar or a party to socialize. I'm vastly uncomfortable in those kind of situations. So I game instead.
It's also a great creative outlet for me, which I also badly need. I'm always bursting at the seams with ideas. Characters, plots, environments, stories, worlds, etc. Gaming gives me a chance to express those things and often allows me to express them in ways that are unique to tabletop gaming.
If I think that it's just a matter of time, then I'll just tough it out, stay in bed, and keep trying to sleep. If it's clear I'm not getting to bed, I'll get up and mess around on the computer or read a book.
Nope. No singing in the shower. At my computer or in my car, but not in the shower. As for what kinds of songs, I sing along with anything I like that I have the range/voice for.
No good answer here, since either one completely guts something that I love. If I'm blind I can still play tabletop RPGs (with help), but can't really do video games or read or watch movies. If I'm deaf, the converse is true. In the end, I think I have to take being deaf, because I think I lose out on more personally by being blind.
Well, most games are filled with horrible disasters, monsters, and dangerous terrain, most of them don't sound like a great place to live. :) But if you put aside that particular problem and assume that there are no problems with the place while you're living there I might go with Pokemon. It's modern (so I can have wifi), there's a lot of interesting things going on, and it's a pretty looking universe.
I think it has to be a red potion from Legend of Zelda for the drink. I've always wondered what that might taste like. For the food, that's harder. Actually, maybe not. I'd want to eat a mushroom from the Mario games. 1-up or super, doesn't matter. Doesn't hurt that I like mushrooms anyway.
There are, I think, 3 places I would go. First, there is a very cute redhead in Scotland I would like to visit. Second is going to Tokyo and seeing the sights there because that's like a video game holy grail for people my age who played so much NES, SNES, and Playstation games. Last is going to Hong Kong because that place seems super interesting.
It's a difficult thing. My family doesn't really get it, so most frequently I have to explain it to them. Even people who are geeks don't always understand the tabletop gaming thing. The key, I find, is to be very patient and to find touchstones that you can build from. Things that they understand that you can then extrapolate and explain further from.
The way I typically explain it is that it's a social experience ("You're sitting around a table with friends and like-minded people") that involves creative decision making in a structured environment. It's partly playing a board game, partly improv theatre, and partly living out cool movies/TV shows/books.
When I'm specifically trying to explain to a person, I'll tailor the explanation to their interests or tastes. Like, if I know someone is a horror movie fan, I couch things in terms related to that. Like saying "Have you ever watched a movie and yelled at a character to do this or don't do that or figured out who the murder was way before the characters? Imagine being that character and having a chance to do things the way you think they should be done. It's now you on the line, you being scared, you having to deal with the mystery."
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There are new people? I was unaware of this!
The first tabletop game, real one that wasn't me kind of making shit like D&D up, was Shadowrun. Before Shadowrun, I put my cousins through what I imagined D&D was like, making up rules and stuff as I went. Eventually it got shut down because my aunt's husband bought into that "games like this are the devil" bullshit.
Now, I read other games before playing Shadowrun. I read some Battletech stuff, the Palladium Robotech books, and yes some D&D too eventually. But I'd never actually played until I started Shadowrun. It didn't go well. My friends were not the sorts of gamers who were really going to appreciate RPGs like that, in retrospect. But I damned well tried.
You mean what keeps from doing game design full time? A lot of things, but at least for me there are two major things standing in my way.
First is that I'm new to doing things professionally. I'm still learning a lot of things about the industry and how to produce professional products like how to art orders and such. I'm still also learning my writing voice as it pertains to doing design, which means that I haven't learned to modulate that voice to adjust for different projects or design needs (i.e. right now I tend to write rather casually, but not excessively so).
The second thing is that right now I'm almost exclusively doing work for 13th Age and that limits my ability to branch out right now and get other professional work. Do I want to do design for other games? Absolutely. I want to work on Fate Core and Gumshoe and other games as well. And eventually I will. Whether it's for a 3rd party publisher or on my own or even for the original publisher. That's my goal. But right now I'm really enjoying working for Fire Opal, doing my Patreon, and doing free stuff for the community.
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