2005-03-28
: The Open House, part 2: Roleplaying with Someone... Please don't post any more comments or marginalia to this thread.
It's wicked old.
Thanks kindly!
1. On 2005-03-28, Vincent wrote:
The rules: no feedback, argument or conversation in this thread. Post a single sentence or a list of single sentences, from your own experiences, good and bad, following this pattern:
Roleplaying with someone can bring you closer together.
Roleplaying with someone can substitute for interacting with them honestly.
Roleplaying with someone can make spending time with them tolerable, even thought you can't stand them.
Roleplaying with someone can reveal things about yourself you didn't intend to share.
Roleplaying with someone can teach you how to share creativity.
Roleplaying with someone can be how you fight with them.
Roleplaying with someone can be how you make up with them.
Roleplaying with someone can make their irritating habits into wedges between you.
Roleplaying with someone can show you how they think of the world.
Roleplaying with someone can show you what they think is right and wrong.
Roleplaying with someone can change your mind about important issues.
Roleplaying with someone can lead up to sleeping with them.
Roleplaying with someone can stand in for sleeping with them.
Roleplaying with someone can be better than sleeping with them.
Roleplaying with someone can teach you important things about yourself.
Roleplaying with someone can teach you how to be a better friend.
Roleplaying with someone can keep you from being a better friend.
Roleplaying with someone can be how you keep them at arm's distance.
Roleplaying with someone can be safer than talking to them.
Roleplaying with someone can be stupider than talking to them.
Roleplaying with someone can touch you in a way that talking to them never would.
Roleplaying with someone can be a way to show that you love them.
Roleplaying with someone can be what you like about them.
Roleplaying with someone can illuminate what you like about them.
Roleplaying with someone can show you a reflection of the beautifully bitter-sweet quintessence of life.
Roleplaying can be the most mundane of experiences if you refuse to be present in the moment, truly sincere with the other participants, and honest with yourself.
Roleplaying with someone can be how you say to your friends "Look how screwed up a person I am, this scares me."
Roleplaying with someone is a way to say it out loud before it destroys you.
Roleplaying with someone can be how you examine something, anything at all, again and again and again and again not really even knowing what it is or why you have to keep examining it.
Roleplaying with someone can make you fast friends, the sort that could call each other 30 years down the line for help, the sort that helps move boxes of books.
Roleplaying with someone is an invitation for collaboration. It's saying "I can't do this by myself."
Roleplaying with someone forces you to think about how they view the world. Or, if not, maybe it should.
Roleplaying with someone is involves a relationship of some kind. What kind of relationship is it this time around?
Roleplaying with someone is a conversation, sometimes an argument. What are you really discussing?
Roleplaying with someone is, at the core, exactly like talking with them, except that it's an aesthetic and more round-a-bout activity. How do you normally communicate? How do you communicate when you roleplay?
Roleplaying with someone goes especially nicely with tea and crumpets.
Role playing with somebody can feel lonely
Role playing with somebody can make you feel misunderstood
Role playing with somebody can lead to admiration of younger siblings who think up really cool ideas
Role playing with somebody can be something you do just because you want to spend time with an older sibling, and the age difference is making it hard to connect with each other when your no longer an kid and don't feel like an adult yet
Roleplaying with someone is an opportunity to take this thing called "fiction" (imagination, storytelling . . . pick your word) and have it actually mean something in the lives of the people you're playing with. It can be an antidote to the loneliness of the creative process; a right-now answer to the question "does my creation matter at all to other people?"