The search for meaning

or musings on the suspension of disbelief.

"Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy?"

- You should know who said (sang) that

Ok, let's get the obvious out of the picture first. This is not directly about the entertainment the game gives you. Nor it is about the satisfaction as one of my favourite bloggers out there (Tao) puts it. It is about what makes the game MEANINGFUL. On my terms.

Roleplaying games are proclaimed by their worshippers as games that base on your imagination. But they are different than your personal fantasies. Consider this: you lay down on your couch and imagine yourself a legendary hero that saves lands and kingdoms from great peril. You are worshipped by the folk, praised by the kings. Dames and wenches faint at the sheer mention of your name. Do you see it? Of course you do, it's the immediate product of your imagination. Does it feel real? Well, that depends on the power of your imagination. Yet there is one problem that I see. This fantasy exists solely for you.

Let's consider the concept of reality. What is the experience of reality? To put it simply (for the purpose of this brief post) it can be perceived as objective truth or subjective collective experience. 

For the purpose of roleplaying games I want to deconstruct the latter. Reality is something we can all agree upon, something we all consider true regardless of its objective genuiness. We've seen artistic expressions of this - take 'Matrix' for instance. What we perceive as real is something that we and our companions can agree upon. Now we're nearly ready to transplant this idea to the roleplaying field.

Things seem more real if more people perceive them as real. Or in other words they perceive them as true. This works for all kinds of conspiracy theories, history falsifications, media manipulation, religion etc. The level of reality grows with each additional 'believer'. If you can convince all the people there is one true god or that the Smolensk plane crash was an assasination then it will become real, at least for all the parties involved (sorry objectivists).

And so, if your fantasy about being a legendary hero can be attested and confirmed by other people than yourself this gives the idea a bit more believability. It becomes a bit more real. More alive.

And isn't his A point we're all playing roleplaying games?

We want to take part in fantastic stories, we want to live a different life for a change. A life full of adventure, intrigue, romance, glory and mystery. Whichever is currently lacking in our experience of everyday reality. And we want to feel it as real as possible.

If we can live through it alongside other people it gains more meaning than our individual fantasizing on a couch (or wherever you do it).

To me there is yet another factor that makes the experience more real. What differentiates the game from our personal fantasies is the presence of objective rules. You can imagine that you win at chess everytime, but what makes it real is actually winning chess playing to the official rules. The fact that the two of you just sit over a chessboard and agree that one of you wins does not appoint an actual winner of chess. (I fully appreciate this analogy can go way further but it's irrelevant for the topic at hand.)

Now, in the preceding post I enumerated the hats a DM wears at the gaming table. In this post's context there is one prominent role that has particular significance - the referee. The reason I recently started stressing that role is due to its reality-creating powers. When I am DM'ing a game there is no real value created if I'm totally in control of what is going on. I can agree on anything with my players after all. But manipulating reality is a lie. And I don't like living a lie.

The only way I can ensure a new value and meaning is born is when objective conditions in terms of rules are around. The rules that I, as a DM, enforce with reasonable diligence.

Under those conditions you gain right to claim having defeated the dragon, saved the kingdom, rescued the princess. Any other scenario will be just you fantasizing about doing something instead of doing it. This might work for you. It does not work for me.

That is the reason I am often astonished by people who 'cheat' at roleplaying games trying to convince the DM to rule always on their favour. Manipulating die rolls. Trying to intimidate the DM. They lie to themsleves. They create an even more fictional reality than a roleplaying game would create.

I love this game. I truly want to touch the fantasy. And I am constantly searching for any means to get closer to this goal.

Why did I write this? I hope you can stop at some point and ask yourself what makes your game valuable. Meaningful. You might come to fresh, interesting conclusions. And well, a bit of philosophy has never done any harm, now has it?

Godspeed