Many people have a frame around their RPG character. There’s a distinct boundary between the character and them, as if they were the character themselves. In many cases, they don’t want one, but what happens when you cross that edge? This is one of the questions I never really asked myself in the past.

What I did notice was there were some games or sessions that felt better than others, and I couldn’t exactly explain why. I was hard pressed to come up with a good answer. One of the ready-made ones that seemed to make sense was game complexity. If the game was too complicated, it wasn’t fun any longer. Later on, I found out that wasn’t enough of an explanation. It was hinting at a contributing factor rather than defining the actual thing that was different.

About eleven years ago or so, I started getting introduced to this idea that some people really gravitate towards an experience where this edge between the character and themselves dissolves. While they don’t actually think they’re the character, they try to have an experience as if they were them in that imagined situation.

I realize that’s what was missing in a lot of the sessions I would just call bad or unsatisfying. It felt like our characters were too plastic, too artificial, not real people. It didn’t feel like they were actually there. It didn’t feel like we were actually there.A

s a kid, when I played make-believe, I didn’t pretend about a guy fighting aliens in outer space. I was that guy. I realized as an adult that’s what I wanted from an RPG session. I wanted to be that other person and to have the experience that they had. I wanted to go past that edge separating me from the character and unite them for that brief period of time.

I didn’t want my hands pressed against the glass looking at the life this character was leading. I wanted to be there on the other side, and so I refused to stand on the other side of that edge.

That, my friends, has made all the difference.