When Fantasy and Reality Blur

I run a role-playing game as one of my hobbies.

It's something I've done since I was a kid. It's become a part of my routine with a core group of my closer friends. It's sort of our version of "poker night" only instead of cards, chips, and cigars it's dice, paper, and soda.

Much the same bullshit comes up. Random conversations about whatever. The latest football game is rarely a topic. The latest action/sci-fi/fantasy movie/tv-series is often a topic.

There's often trash-talking. There's ribald humor. There's terrible, terrible puns.

It's a bonding thing. We all have our avenues for such. Some folks have poker night. Some have knitting groups. Some jam in a garage band. Some console game. We table-top game.

It's been a part of my life for... well more than half of my entire life.

And sometimes it gets weirdly-personal.

Table-top role-playing games involve creating characters. Essentially a role-playing game is just a narrated story in which individual players create a story character and decide what that character does, often in reaction to the story's narrator (the game master) or other players.

Players get attached to their characters. This is, to me, a good thing. A character is a reflection of a person's psyche. A character is a piece of the imagination with a smattering of the soul. It's a little piece of wish-fulfillment.

We're attached to our wishes, after all

As a result, sometimes conflicts come up in this. Conflicts of style, wishes, and personality types.

My current group is going through a bit of that. Real life is dealing some raw cards to more than a few of my friends and they're all reacting differently to real life by how they play in the game.

And now I've got two of these players in some kind of feud. It's like watching a pair of kids squabble. I feel like a babysitter who can't seem to find a way to make them behave and has no real way to make them take a time out.

It's starting to spin in bizarre ways. I can't tell if it's as serious as some of the rhetoric I get in emails would imply. It's certainly a problem.

It's like herding cats sometimes. I wonder what madness drives me to keep this insane hobby.

I wonder why I don't drink more.