baroque_mongoose

I'm a roleplayer of fairly recent standing.

I first came across it when I went to university, and I was definitely intrigued. It looked like fun. Well, maybe not Call of Cthulhu, which some of my friends played, because I tend to shy away from any kind of horror (unless it's so well written as to be not horrifying because I'm so busy appreciating the prose style; Algernon Blackwood, take a bow, please). But other games looked good, and I very nearly got involved... but didn't.

The reason I didn't was that I had a strong intuition that it would be bad for me at that time. Having just emerged from an extremely stressful childhood, I had quite poor mental health at the time, although I didn't yet have enough of a clue to put it like that. I was, later on, diagnosed fairly regularly with both anxiety and depression (sometimes, but not always, both at once, and I'd get a side order of agoraphobia when the depression was especially severe, which was very odd because I don't normally have that at all), and it's fair to say I probably had at least one of those conditions while I was at university, though obviously there's no way to prove it. I'm just going on how things felt when I was diagnosed later. And I felt that roleplaying wouldn't help because I didn't have properly formed mental barriers. I would get too involved with my character.

I was wiser than I knew. Fast forward many years to where a group of online friends decided to play... I forget exactly what it was called, but it involved werewolves. I had an anxiety diagnosis at the time, but I felt that for one thing I'd dealt with quite a few of my childhood issues, and for another thing I was on the mend. I was taking medication which was controlling the anxiety fairly effectively. So I joined in, but it wasn't so very long before I had to leave because my character was doing my head in. It didn't help that she was quite highly strung in any case (a lot of werewolves were, in this game). Thankfully everyone was very understanding about it.

At the age of about 40, I was healed from depression. I'd had prayer for it before, but this time was different; someone prayed for me and I actually felt it go. It's difficult to describe that experience any better than that, but it's been twenty-odd years now and I have not had depression since, with one very brief exception: I got depression as a side effect of a medication, and as soon as the doctor changed the medication it disappeared. That lasted less than a week. I did have a couple of stints of anxiety after that, but they were a lot easier to handle than the depression, plus they were mild compared to what I'd been used to; and I haven't even had anxiety for more than five years now.

Let me emphasise that I'm not trying to say that roleplaying will exacerbate all mental health issues. It depends very much on what they are, and in fact I suspect that some people may find it actively helpful, because it gets you out of your own head for a while. What I am saying is that I find I need to be fully mentally healthy before I get involved in it.

Anyway. Since being healed from depression, I've done a fair bit of roleplaying, specifically D&D and Shadowrun, and I'm now free to enjoy it immensely. In essence, any RPG campaign is a collaborative story; the GM provides the bare bones of the plot, and the players, as characters, flesh it out. While it's always satisfying to create a story, there's something even better about doing that as a group. You get to bounce off one another in fun and unexpected ways.

I can't resist giving a lovely example from the D&D campaign I was in that went on hold till Simon could manage to sleep through the night regularly (which, sadly, he still can't). I was initially GM-ing, although when I discovered that one of the players was better at it than I was, I very happily handed over the mantle; this incident happened while I was still in charge. The party had been sent by the local queen to find her son, the crown prince, who had run away in search of adventure; he appeared to have gone into a massive underground building, so they were exploring that. And part of this building had recently been taken over by the local Evil Cult, who'd set up an Evil Altar in a hurry (so it was just a wooden table covered in a black cloth embroidered with the standard Evil Sigils).

The party found this thing, and our paladin, being our paladin, said: "We must burn it with fire!"

"Hold up," said our rogue. "I've got a better idea."

Rogue gets out dagger and slices a couple of centimetres off one of the table legs. Because you cannot take a Wobbly Evil Altar seriously.

I'd never have thought of that one!