Problem Solving and Lateral Thinking: With a good GM, you should be able to be challenged in ways that you can beat, but aren’t obvious. Particularly in GURPS, it doesn’t devolve into “I hit the monster until it dies”. Ever thought about how you’d negotiate with terrorists? Escape imprisonment? Survive a zombie apocalypse as a vlogger newscrew? When you play in person, you’re forced to think really fast. (“I can attack this which is doing the most damage, but it’d take a while and there’s still lackeys”, “Do I start healing this guy now, or just finish the fight?”, “What can I possibly say to make this seem innocuous?”). Also teaches the importance of planning ahead (“What can I say to the guard so that X will agree with me, even though we can’t talk?”).
You also have rules to brush up against, and designing a good character is difficult. Do you try and remain a generalist? Specialize at something really useful? What’s your role in the party?
Social: You have to play and deal with other people. You play the game in-person and it is prone to making a lot of in-jokes. Brings friends together and whatnot.
It also has a lot of the same benefits as improv with regards to trying out new character traits. You’re not supposed to be pretending to be yourself, and you can try out personality tweaks in a way that’s not reflective of yourself. I played outgoing characters before I became less awkward as a person.
I’d say especially running tabletop role-playing games.
You have to balance different players’ tastes—which means learning to measure their tastes. You have to predict the actions of the people you know and plan for different choices—and you will be surprised by things they decide to do. You have to be organized, and especially you have to figure out how organized you have to be.
Well, they do slightly different things but I agree with your point. I think that players need to optimize more (aiming for a smaller slice of search space, with fewer possible actions), but that there’s lots of useful rationality training you get from running the game that you don’t get from playing.
Running a game gives you more experience working with different epistemic states. Like, nothing exists in the game-universe until you say it does so you have in your head what you know and are thinking of having happen, and what the players know. Good GMs are able to keep the two straight and change what they thought was happening, but wasn’t yet revealed, behind the scenes in able to adapt. For example, if you had another ambush in an encounter but the party’s already beat up you can just not have the ambush happen.
GMs also need to better predict other people’s actions, agreed. And design challenges that aren’t so easy as to be boring, but not so hard as to total party kill.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games: Two main benefits:
Problem Solving and Lateral Thinking: With a good GM, you should be able to be challenged in ways that you can beat, but aren’t obvious. Particularly in GURPS, it doesn’t devolve into “I hit the monster until it dies”. Ever thought about how you’d negotiate with terrorists? Escape imprisonment? Survive a zombie apocalypse as a vlogger newscrew? When you play in person, you’re forced to think really fast. (“I can attack this which is doing the most damage, but it’d take a while and there’s still lackeys”, “Do I start healing this guy now, or just finish the fight?”, “What can I possibly say to make this seem innocuous?”). Also teaches the importance of planning ahead (“What can I say to the guard so that X will agree with me, even though we can’t talk?”).
You also have rules to brush up against, and designing a good character is difficult. Do you try and remain a generalist? Specialize at something really useful? What’s your role in the party?
Social: You have to play and deal with other people. You play the game in-person and it is prone to making a lot of in-jokes. Brings friends together and whatnot. It also has a lot of the same benefits as improv with regards to trying out new character traits. You’re not supposed to be pretending to be yourself, and you can try out personality tweaks in a way that’s not reflective of yourself. I played outgoing characters before I became less awkward as a person.
I’d say especially running tabletop role-playing games.
You have to balance different players’ tastes—which means learning to measure their tastes. You have to predict the actions of the people you know and plan for different choices—and you will be surprised by things they decide to do. You have to be organized, and especially you have to figure out how organized you have to be.
Agreed.
Well, they do slightly different things but I agree with your point. I think that players need to optimize more (aiming for a smaller slice of search space, with fewer possible actions), but that there’s lots of useful rationality training you get from running the game that you don’t get from playing.
Running a game gives you more experience working with different epistemic states. Like, nothing exists in the game-universe until you say it does so you have in your head what you know and are thinking of having happen, and what the players know. Good GMs are able to keep the two straight and change what they thought was happening, but wasn’t yet revealed, behind the scenes in able to adapt. For example, if you had another ambush in an encounter but the party’s already beat up you can just not have the ambush happen.
GMs also need to better predict other people’s actions, agreed. And design challenges that aren’t so easy as to be boring, but not so hard as to total party kill.