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Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 6 months ago

The Cheetoist Philosophy

We game for the snacks. And also the dice. But mostly, just to hang out with friends and tell tall stories.

Rpg books are just a bunch of guidelines for how to tell your tall stories, and give you a fair excuse to roll lots of dice and eat cheetos. To make your games more fun, talk to your group.

In any game, it's part social, part game. For most gamers, it's social first, game second. Game first, social second - that's for people who get paid to do it. Mike Jordan never said to his coach, "but it's just a game, who cares about the rules"; he took it seriously, because of money. Well, give me ten million bucks a year to roleplay, and I'll take it seriously, too. Until then, I am a Cheetoist. That's it.

My purpose with this wiki is to provide practical advice to roleplaying gamers in support of the Cheetoist philosophy. If you game purely for the game itself, for competition, as group therapy, or education, then you are a crazy person and should go elsewhere.

The heart of the site is Why Game Groups Fuck Up, an e-book describing all the things which can go wrong and right in game groups. The essence of that is people first, everything else second. If you keep that in mind you won't go far wrong. The reason is that roleplaying is a social creative hobby . The "social" part is the prerequisite for the "creative" part; a good game group can make even a crap game fun, but a bad game group cannot make even a good game fun. So Cheetoism deals mainly with the "social" aspect of gaming.

For reasons they like to keep to themselves, people have come to look at this page times.

Why do we roleplay, anyway?

Because it's fun, and it's natural to human beings.

 

My personal theory(1) is that people are natural roleplayers. Give a little kid a doll or action figure, and in seconds you'll see roleplaying. Toy dinosaurs, chess pieces, toy stoves and plastic food, whatever - all grist for the roleplaying jones. Sometime in their preteen years, it is wiped out from many kids' concious memories and I don't know why.(2) They forget that they used to roleplay, and are embarassed whenever it is brought up. Some kids never go through that. These are the people who take to roleplaying like they've done it all their lives - because they have. Other people have to be re-introduced, slowly and awkwardly, because this embarassment makes them fight the natural fluency of roleplay that every little kid posesses. "Ye must become as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven," said a Jewish carpenter of some note, probably about roleplaying. I have re-introduced dozens of people to roleplaying, and geekiness is not a requirement. The only thing you need is the desire to find something you've lost.

-clash bowley, authour of Cold Space and other awesome rpgs.

(1) in a totally non-academic meaning - it's just seeing a pattern from extensive observation.

(2) though possibly related to fnord indoctrination.

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