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Roleplaying and Maturity:

Whilst it takes imagination to roleplay, it also takes a large dose of maturity. The mature individual should accept the bad things in the game as easily as they rejoice in the good. This should be common sense, but on occassions an immature player can't quite make the distinction between the game and reality - they might get angry with a fellow player or GM for taking what he considers deliberate actions "against him". In turn, the immature player might spoil the game by retaliating against these apparent personal attacks, taking unnecessary action against other players in the game or "sabotaging" the game by deliberatly doing stupid things with his character. Whilst this can happen to any player when they become too engrossed in the excitement of the game, usually the players who repeatedly act this way are highly paranoid individuals with personality problems which evolved before they got into roleplaying.

Maturity is a quality which varies between different people and is certainly not guarenteed with age - some 17 year olds are more mature than some 40 year olds. Indeed, I am a one of the biggest "kids" in the Society, as the photos in the Social Section of this web site show. This does not mean that the ideal player must be terribly serious - indeed we encourage the opposite! A good player will get excited during the exciting moments of the game and will have as much fun as possible with their character and the game. But essentially they should always remember that an RPG is only a game and should not get terribly upset if something negative happens to their character. Someone who begins to shout, curse or even cry when something bad happens to their character (or they take it personally when someone's character insults or injures theirs) perhaps isn't quite ready to participate in roleplaying!

Misconceptions about Roleplaying