I got into Role-playing Games when I was around 11. We were middle class but on the stingy side. Our parents were starting up their business and we had to cut a lot of corners when it came to toys. So we played imaginary games. My brothers and I learned about DnD from the cartoon, comic book ads, and fantasy fiction in movies and anime in the 80s. We bought a very discounted but original DnD computer game at around 1990, but it was so old it was broken. My brothers and I only had the manuals and we liked the ideas so much we used it as the baseline for our imaginary games.
We studied in Alabang while living in San Juan. Our parents, struggling with their business, made us stay with them in the office. After class it was about another 3-4 hours before we got home. That was when we would play RPGs a lot. We didn’t have dice and we didn’t know what it was called. It was a year later that I found out that it was called RPGs and what DnD was all about from my classmates who spent summers in the US.
Role-playing was cheap, forced us to read a lot, and all other tools was left to our creativity and imagination. It was a game I played with my brothers and brought us very close.
It eventually became the focus of my career choice, taking up Multi-Media Arts specializing in Game Design and writing a 19C Philippine Historical Role-playing Game for my thesis.
Fast-forward to today. Role-playing has become a powerful business critical thinking technique. As game theory unraveled the complex interactions among individuals and organizations with mathematics, it highlighted the ability of empathy to intuitively make sense of these complex interactions. It has become a structured exercise for developing one’s empathy, honing it to better take in the character of another person and to generate ideas with the shift in perspective.
Sample Role-plays from Harvard Business School Press
Teaching business, management and strategy through role-playing a Scientific Journal
Teaching Empathy through Role-playing Exercise from the American Humanist Association.
i too played too in college. and i met some good people (lifetime friends) from playing it.
i used to play the mage thinking that it is the closest class to someone like me who is an atheist in real life. these days i like playing the cleric because nobody from the group appear to like playing the cleric anymore. plus i get a kick from playing someone who i couldn't be in real life.
I preferred monks. I got to be a holy man, AND I still got to kill more people than our Barbarian, with my bare hands to boot. XD
Hey justin, did you know Stephen Colbert was also a D&D player and GM? He stated that it was his GM'ing days that helped him polish his ability to deliver witty ad-lib remarks when he's RP'ing as his alter-ego.
Vin Diesel was also a huge D&D fan in the day – he also claimed that his "Riddick" persona and his real-life tats was inspired by on of the characters he used – a dark elf vampire hunter XD
Yeah heard about them both. Colbert was a DnD addict especially after some personal tragedy which I forgot the details.
BTW you might want to see this video: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/i-hit…
"A new player joins. A character is rolled. The adventure begins. Join adult film performers Kimberly Kane, Zak Sabbath, Mandy Morbid, and Satine Phoenix, a stripper named Connie, and a hairdresser named Frankie for some hardcore, old school D&D action. Sasha Grey guest stars."
They are just geeks like us. In one article Zack talks about how they ran a game during one of the Industry's Award ceremonies.
paladin here haha
Great. Empathy and the Prisoner's Dilemma of prisoners without walls.