#RPGaDay2018: Day 1 - What do you love about RPG's?

It's that time of year again! 

As with previous years, I'm hoping to write in advance and was going to schedule to go live each day at noon British Summer Time but have decided to go with midnight instead, with any other posts I manage to write this month going live in the evenings. I'm also going to try to stay on point and not ramble!

If you're taking part, share a link to your response in the comments :)

So, what do I love about RPG's? Considering I've been playing them for around half my life, you might think this would be easy to answer. Turns out, not so much. I think it boils down to 2 things: socialising and escapism. 

On the first, I love to spend time with my friends, and roleplay gives a great excuse to do that. I've also made friends I wouldn't have otherwise, and talking about games on social media has given me a wider network of people to gossip and socialise with, and exposed me to wider world views (some of which I've found challenging).

But also, I love to socialise in character, whether with player characters or NPC's. It fulfils my need for companionship in a compressed manner, especially valuable at the moment where I'm working from home a lot and end up feeling stir crazy from lack of interaction and face to face communication. Getting together with a few friends at the weekend and pretending to spend time with many more people than that seems to be really helping me cope.

For the second, escapism, well, that preceding paragraph actually applies, because it's escapist socialising, I guess. It's also my adoration of story (per Sir Pterry's 'Pan narrans' classification of humans), of course, and I think the fact I have more control in games than in real life (even if my characters don't). That's fun for me.