thread: 2009-12-08 : Your 3 Insights
On 2009-12-22, Ben Lehman wrote:
Hah. I thought of one I can write this for in public.
1) I think that the essence of DnD is that it is a dangerous, horrible world full of stuff that will kill you, but it can be navigated with sufficient cleverness, luck, and dogged determination to live. As it happens, this is also the essence of fairy tales.
2) There is abstractly better and worse role-playing. High quality role-playing places an emphasis on the shared imagined space, and taking it seriously as space. The best solutions to problems are those that view this space as critically important, the worst solutions view the game as a board or video game.
3) Real live human nature. The true story of history is not about knights and heroes, but about ordinary people who are poor, desperate, and terrified, for whom knights and heroes are just another thing that will kill them dead.
These stories being true, they are inherently more interesting.
