Asperger and Role-Playing

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I remember reading that one characteristic of Asperger syndrome is impaired make-believe play. But then I read this: Link and it says that "As they get older, many boys remain infatuated with role-playing fantasy games, a special interest that often follows them into young adulthood." So how does that tie into the impaired make-believe play? Is it because role-playing games tend to be structured and have specific rules and therefore they appeal to aspies?

I always had a vivid imagination.

I haven't seen many role-playing games but I think they do have the advantage of quite a lot of scripting..........I'd like to play but I've always been too shy......maybe if I could rehearse on my own till I was confident I'd got a credible persona, I'd be OK.

I definitely share the fascination with such games, though as I say I haven't really messed with them yet. I like the idea of any kind of acting, and I'm sure I'd be able to do it a lot better with a definite accent and persona like you'd probably get in a role-playing game. If I put on a strong accent, my mumbling tendencies vanish just like they do when I'm singing.

When I first tried to do tabletop RP - a long while ago now! - I completely failed to understand the point. I understood the gaming and mechanics side, and didn't understand the social side; it didn't work out. I found live RP easier to do - really doing something is easier for me than sitting at a table saying I'm doing something - but still didn't really get the point. And there's a staggeringly complicated set of social dynamics among LRP players, let alone during LRP games... I didn't get that, either. Without going into too much detail, by far the greater part of LRP is socialising-based and I never got it. I'm bad at small talk anyway and really bad at having to react quickly in conversations, and my imagination is dire, so even now that I understand what this RP thing is really about I can't do it well. On the other hand, LRP is sometimes great fun, attracts oddballs and is generally more accepting of eccentric behaviour than most social groups, so that was why I kept at it. The handful of friends I have are almost all LRPers and/or reenactors.

Unfortunately I don't have a local group where I live now, and the big festival events - a thousand or more people in a field - tend to drive me into shutdown (and I usually end up drinking myself silly and smoking, neither of which I normally do, and have a sneaking feeling that if I see dead-pig-in-a-bun - the finest food known to man - while drunk I'll eat some, vegetarian or not. )
It's a bit silly to go to a festival only to spend most of the time lying in my tent going "arg, make it stop."
I did try an interesting thing at a smaller event I went to - I was playing an artist-type character and part of that was drawing sketches of everyone - "just practicing" in character, but out of character to help me sort out who was who. It was very useful and I'll probably do the same thing next time I work up the nerve to go to an event.

Don't ask me, I've a terrible imagination for role-playing.
The last time I'd a dream, I was being crushed by Tetris blocks!

I loooooved table top RPGs in college. As long as there is a set of rules I can pretty much adapt to any role playing game because there, I don't have to be myself. I become someone else. My characters were usually a little bit like me, but different, almost like alternate universe versions. I even created a whole world and began to run a game myself so I can see people being able to play or not being able to depending on things in general.

I am a member of a Buffalo area gaming group. I like the idea of the rules, movement of the miniatures on the map, weapon ranges & damage, the character stastics, rolling the polyhedral dice, and only thing I do not do is the person to person roleplaying which I do not due.

Last edited by Todesking on 23 Jun 2010, 1:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

if you continue to read that section, the next sentence specifies "video games and role-play games involving cards and complicated scripts". my entire house is made up of gamer geeks, including myself, so we are very familiar with these types of role-playing fantasy games.

in video games, there is no imagination required since the computer does it all for you. you basically just control an avatar that interacts with other people and the fantasy world. npcs (non-player characters) send you on quests, you go places or kill mobs (mobile, a computer created AI creature), its very directed play. some people do really get into the roles they play, others do not. it may be easier for someone without spontaneous imaginative play to participate in video games rather than live role play however because of the immersible nature of the game and how much is scripted for you. for an aspie that can hyperfocus, they can really get lost in the game for hours and hours at a time.

you also get to choose the level of your interaction with other players; you could choose to be involved in a large guild with hundreds of other people, or you can primarily solo level your character and not interact with any other players at all. you get to interact socially without all the face to face stuff, so no eye contact or reading body language required. like these forums, its a social outlet without the stuff that aspies find so hard in social contact.

there are card games, like magic the gathering, that are fantasy based but do not involve actual role playing like the old dungeons & dragons games used to. magic is just a competitive card game like playing any other card game, no imagination required.

i can definitely see role playing games as good aspie outlets and a hyperfocused interest. my aspie SO and i actually met playing an online role playing game =P he is much more social in online gaming than in real life, talking to him online you would not really notice any issues at all, but in person he is very withdrawn socially. we are both 38 now and still very much gamers, altho he prefers fps type games like l4d and i like the fantasy role playing like wow. so he likes to kill other players, and i like to pretend im something else (im not asd). my 4 yr old aspie is also very much into video games, its one of his two main interests, specifically anything mario.

been a D&D nut for years, preferred rule-set is 2nd edition. 4th edition was just dumbed down to hell to make it play like and appeal to WoW players.

As for LARP I have done that as well. There is nothing like taking a giant hammer and just baseball swinging them in the gut and sending them to the ground. I have made my own weapons, same for a bunch of other people I have done it with. Right now our LARP Group numbers at around 40 members. No, we don't have wizards, which makes things A LOT easier. As for me, I'm currently a Berserker that uses a 6 foot long sword as well as having a dual wield set if I need to fight someone with shields. It makes for good exercise too, since you are constantly blocking, dodging, running, and swinging your weapon/s.

While tabletop RPGs aren't "scripted" in the sense that your character has to select from one of a few lines to say, they do possess limitations absent from the "imaginative play" cited earlier in the article. The game follows the rules in its rulebooks; the game world exists within these limits, and is laid down by the gamemaster. For instance, while children running around playing Cops and Robbers can shout out things like "Bang! You're dead!" "No I'm not, you missed!", people playing, say, GURPS Modern have to roll three six-sided dice and compare the result to their Firearms: Pistol skill (assuming a pistol is the weapon of choice here), adjusted by the distance to the target and the target's Dexterity. If the result is good enough, roll for the weapon's damage. If the target has more Hit Points than the bullet took from him, he'll be okay (although in GURPS, it's also possible to lose enough Hit to be in debilitating pain, reducing your rolls); if the total damage from the bullet is greater than the remaining Hit, target is down and dying.

Also, while children can just claim they've pulled a new weapon out of nowhere ("I got a machine gun!"), in a tabletop RPG, if it's not written down on your character sheet and approved by the GM, you don't have it. This does lead to some gamers, called "munchkins", trying to load their characters down like the White Knight in "Through the Looking Glass", and claiming that since they're still one pound short of their encumbrance limit, they have no problem with the mass of all that stuff. (Brilliantly skewered in "DM of the Rings", an online strip that presented the "Lord of the Rings" movies as if they were actually a D&D campaign in a world where Tolkien never wrote. One scene has Aragorn referring to putting something in his pack - "it's only 99.5 pounds, and my encumbrance limit is 100, so it's okay." Gimli asks, "You mean that pack that holds everything you can put in it? The one that doesn't show in your character portrait? The one that never gets in the way? The one that whenever you open it, the item you need is right on top?" "Yeah, what about it?" "That's not a pack, that's an invisible leather TARDIS! I'm just sayin'...")

There is the attraction of being someone else, although for myself, if I want to portray someone who definitely isn't me, I have to go all-out the other direction, like my D&D warrior, Big Phil. Big Phil is as big as a house, as strong as a horse, as tough as an ox, as fast as a cat, and as smart as a box of rocks. His INT score is barely high enough for him to speak Common; he will never learn another language. His family was killed by orcs when he was a boy, but he can't remember which tribe it was, so he just tries to kill any orc he finds, figuring that eventually it'll be the right ones. He goes by Big Phil because he can't remember his last name. He is, however, a genius when it comes to using swords or axes to dismember things... One schtick I use with him is that when he comes up against a situation where brawn is not the solution, I save against his INT to see if he realizes this. When he fails (which is more often than not), he acts out in the most obvious fashion. Luckily, when he kicked open the door into the room guarded by a trained bullette (after growing weary of the rest of the party strategizing their entrance), the party had the MacGuffin they needed to deal with it, found on another floor, because there was no way even he could penetrate its natural armor.

To me it's about being in an environment that is free of the things I have the hardest time with.
If you're typing what you're saying into a computer programme online MMORPG, you have to be more concise about what you're saying, because there are no facial expressions and body language to read along side of it. NT's have to learn to adapt to us Aspies on RPG's because they have no choice, that's the way the game is set up.

I think there is an additional element here, and that is that many of us are on the side of being unhappy with either our life or the world we live in. Having an alternate world where we can go, and be at the very least an equal (though usually superior, because we tend to excel in these games) has a certain quality to it that draws us there. RPG's need dedication to build up your character.. and obsessive dedication is something many of us have in excess. Thus we tend to do well, and be rewarded for dedication and obsession, whereas outside of the workplace, dedication to the level of obsession is usually frowned upon.

Many of us also have a fascination with stats and figures. This can play a role too. To build your character and to play him/her effectively, you need not only to work on your stats, but to be constantly aware of all your stats. All your attributes are quantitative and objective... In real life how strong I am is qualitative and subjective. I deal better with things I can put a number to. That I can easily compare between, that one look at a number and I know exactly what I'm dealing with.

Of late, i've gotten away from RPG's by my own decision... I won't say choice here, because I didn't really want to, I'd love to go back to being a gamer... but real life gets in the way, and there are many things about real life that I prefer now to gaming, the primary one being my son, Micheal who is sitting here beside me as I write this... goo gooing away, and i can turn away from this thread for moments or longer at a time, and not be eaten up or worse, blessed, by some priest that I'm trying to destroy.

I also think that they can be a great way for Aspies to learn social skills. So long as they don't totally become a substitute for it. mind you if the alternative is no social life RPGs are better than nothing!

I've played RPGs and whatnot, but my problem is taking some of what is happening literally (in the context of relationships). Otherwise, I'm less concerned about the RP, but more interested in the game's utilities (spells, weapons, armor, gear, etc). I'd say that we work well with RPGs since there is a lot of defined aspects that help it make sense (that, and it's easy for use to play the absent-minded, hyper-focused <class>).

I enjoy text-based role playing games. I've never tried tabletop games but I'd like to. I also like video games such as Oblivion.

Thanks for all your replies, particularly DeaconBlues, that sure answers a lot of questions.

"Lets play some texas,Motherf***er" dii-di-di-dii ...

I've wondered the same thing, but the scripting explanation makes sense. I've not spent much time playing any sorts of games, let alone role playing ones, and didn't do well at pretend as a child. I played with insects and built play houses in the woods. And I took certain things to stash away; lipstick, sugar packets, and perfume. I had quite a collection.