RPG Elite Philosophy – Quality #1: The Value of Time.

RPG Elite philosophy is a proprietary idea I came up with as a high standard for a particular kind of player in the tabletop RPG community. When I set out to define the whole of the philosophy, I wrote down nine qualities all RPG Elites exhibit or have. I did that in a summary video which you can watch here.

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After the summary video, I went into detail about each quality and why RPG Elites would have that quality. Today, we will look at Quality #1.

RPG Elites Don’t Play Tabletop RPGs Seven Days a Week.

This is more than likely a given for many TTRPG (tabletop RPG) players. There are three sub-points why we have this quality.

We Have a Life Outside of Playing Tabletop RPGs

A large segment — dare I say the largest segment — of players in the tabletop RPG community is young adults and older. The misconception about tabletop RPGs is that it’s only for children or teenagers. That is unequivocally untrue. Because the majority fall into this age demographic, we do not have the luxury of playing tabletop RPGs seven days a week.

I’m not sure that it would be a luxury at that point. It very well could be an obsession or addiction (we will talk about that in a separate post). We have responsibilities which include jobs, wives and children, or other family we need to pay attention to. In addition, some of us have goals and ambitions we are pursuing, among other things.

The time it takes to invest in a tabletop RPG is not a small amount. This is especially true for the GM. A session takes an average of three to four hours. Back in the day when I was younger, six to eight hours was not uncommon and pretty standard. But we could afford to do that because we had all the time in the world, especially in the summer. As of the writing this post, I run The One Ring campaign where we play biweekly every other Saturday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. That’s a four-hour minimum. Sometimes, we go over a bit.

When You Don’t Have a Life

One time in an interview for one of our slots in our campaign, me and one of my longtime players were interviewing a potential candidate to join our campaign. It is one of the necessary steps in order to join our campaign. We are interviewing this guy who was interested and began asking him some standard questions like what was his background in tabletop RPGs. During the interview, he informed us — as God is my witness; I kid you not — he was in 17 RPGs. That’s not a grammatical error.

Seventeen.

That made no sense to me and still doesn’t. Even today, as I recount the story, it still baffles my mind. It simply does not compute. By the way, this was every week.

To be fair, he told us some were play-by-post. He didn’t let us know how many play-by-post, but if we give him an extremely conservative number and say that eight of the 17 were play-by-post, that is still a significant amount of time to write out all the things you would need to write. So, with nine games left that were being played virtually or in person, and an average of three hours per session, what you have their ladies and gentlemen is a part-time job invested in tabletop RPGs at 27 hours per week. This is not including the time it takes to write all those posts.

It didn’t help that he told us he would not be sure if he could make it all the time because of his commitments in the other games. Here’s a hint for you — if you are in an interview for a position in a game, or anything else for that matter, don’t lead off by saying you cannot make it all the time because of another game commitment when you have already been informed that committed players is what is desired. That’s a sure way to make sure you don’t make it into that game. As you can imagine, we never gave him a second interview.

This is what happens when you don’t have a life. At its root, it really is disturbing. That someone would be so engrossed in tabletop RPGs to where it has consumed their life to that extent is beyond odd. We’re not talking about someone like me who does this for a living. This is someone who is not even a GM but a player. Something is wrong with that deeply.

We Want to Savor the RPG Experience.

RPG Elites don’t want to treat our experience as some humdrum, run-of-the-mill event. We have no desire for the experience to go stale, which is something that can and will happen if you invest yourself too much in tabletop RPGs. This will even happen even if you’re playing different types of RPGs. RPG Elites do not want to fall victim to that malady. We want that experience to be something special. It becomes laissez-faire and normative. We want something to look forward to every time we come to the table.

RPG Elites Want Tabletop RPG Sessions to Be Our Vacation, Not Our Reality

As I mentioned before, playing 17 tabletop RPGs weekly is disturbing. It signals that individual does not know how to deal with real-life. So what they do to compensate is to exist in escape mode all the time. Reality is too much for them. This can happen in many ways, but people deal with it by some form of escapism — casual sex, drugs, work. They’re all substitutes of being incapable of dealing with life.

Some people, trying to play devil’s advocate or giving the benefit of the doubt, saying maybe these people are physically impaired, and that’s all they can do. I beg to differ. If they can attend 17 different tabletop RPGs, they can actually add value and live a life that is more productive. They just choose not to. It’s difficult to find sympathy for people who can do but won’t.

We Don’t Want to Get Tabletop RPG Burnout

This is the flip side of wanting to savor the experience. RPG Elites always want to be excited and motivated for the RPGs we play. It’s very easy to become burned out on RPGs if we play them constantly, as I mentioned early. They then lose their appeal as a means of mental vacationing, which is what they should be. Though you may hear many in the tabletop RPG space mention escapism, that is a poor description and I want to encourage you to avoid saying that like the plague. There’s a reason for it.

We Don’t Want to Become Addicted.

Tabletop RPG addiction is a thing. It’s one of those subjects most in the tabletop RPG space would rather sweep under the rug or ignore altogether (remember that guy who was in seventeen different tabletop RPG sessions?).

The reason many people play RPGs as much as they do is because they are chasing a dopamine high. Some people may be addicted and they don’t know it, nor will they admit it. This is one of those subjects that needs a post of its own, so I’ll be making a separate post on this.

If you’re interested in more RPG Elite Philosophy, here’s a link to the playlist over at the RPG Elite YouTube channel – RPG Elite Philosophy Playlist.

Check out Part 2 of this series.