As a teenager I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, then Gamma World, Traveller, Car Wars, Top Secret, Marvel Superheroes, DC Heros, Paranoia, Star Frontiers, GURPS, the Fighting Fantasy books, Runequest (that no one ever played because it was an exercise in audit accounting mostly). I also designed several games, only two of which were polished enough for publication, The Dirty Old West, and more recently, the far more complete and more useful Surviving the Current Zombie Apocalypse, which also has a starter module for those that have never played a pen and paper RPG and seem to think it is some kind of arcane skill in dark arts.
The reality however is that the hardest part of pen and paper RPGs in today’s day is that most teenagers and young people are:
* often barely literate enough to even be able to read the game and understand it properly.
* raised to think that anything in paper format can be better played or understood in video format or on a computer game, and finally,
* almost certainly do not even have a set of three or four friends that they can meet up with regularly at someone’s house taking over a table for hours at a time to play the game with.
A mixture of trying to ensure children are raised in single parent families and often with no siblings, kept away from other children other than in the mandated ways approved by your overlords, and the similar atomising of adult relations, particularly of parents with children, because they are forced to struggle daily just to keep food on the table in many cases, ensures that the likelihood of a small group of friends getting together to play such games os only seen on TV if they watch programs like Stranger Things and pay attention.
So those are the down sides. The barriers to entry if you will.
However, the benefits are countless. Let me list some of the most prominent:
* A sharp increase in reading comprehension, writing ability, math ability, and learning rules and adapting them dynamically to arising unforeseen situations.
* A DEFINITE increase in imagination ability. And please, please believe me that an active imagination rooted in an approximation of certain with certain rules to follow is a far, far, FAR more useful attribute to have than learning basic knowledge o formation that is almost invariably available at your fingertips today. Being able to conceptualise a situation, problem, or idea, and then conceiving of ways and means to respond, adapt, solve or overcome them is absolutely the best brain exercise you can give a mind. It trains you to think. To find solutions. To never assume there is only one or two ways to solve a problem or situation. To think, quite literally, outside the box.
Over the last few years I tried to introduce RPGs to a few Zoomers and I was astonished at the fact that my 10 year old daughter was a better role player than they were. They seemed to be totally unable to even imagine the scenarios presented to them, while my daughter was adding contextually humorous things her character was doing, which made perfect sense from the game world perspective but were funny from our bird’s eye view of events.
The Zoomers could barely remember they had weapons to fight off the monsters they came across.
It is clear that for young people today, to play a pen and paper RPG would likely require a certain effort of will that most do not have, however, such perseverance would absolutely pay off in the long term. I can absolutely attest to the fact that playing such games made me practically better at real life situations in many more contexts that one might guess.
Ultimately, the point is that only a few will take the time and effort to learn to become players. Because after all, in all the worlds, almost all the people in them, are NPCs.
I agree with everything you said here. I’ll be getting into a new game soon, and a couple of the younger guys have never played a pen and paper RPG before. We’ll see how it goes.
I’ve been saying for years that we are living Cyberpunk 2020.
I wish. We are actually living in the Paranoia universe, shortly before they force everyone underground into Alpha Complex.
Bought. And if I or my kids are traumatised by anything in this game, I’m suing you! An RPG snakebite, man, that can scar you for life.
Good luck with the court case, you’ll be able to collect a tin of olive oil in about 15 years if you win!
[…] of you who have read this post, may better understand this […]
[…] Are there plenty of gold-digging whores out there? Sure. Just like there are plenty of lazy, drug-addled, loser men that will accomplish nothing in their entire life. Most humans suck. That’s just how things are in this fallen world. But assuming you are not an NPC, which is why you read my blog regularly, you both aspire to a bit more than an NPC wife or husband, and in order to be with a Player Character level husband or wife, guess what YOU have to be? That’s right, player character material. If you don’t know what an NPC or PC is, read this first. […]
[…] least you should get a sense of the fun that can be had. The reason I think this is important were explained in this post I did about how no one realised how useful pen and paper RPGs were… until […]