pretense first (what is an RPG?)
No shade if you have a different definition. I'm just trying to clarify a concept for myself.
Roleplay is when you're having experiences and making decisions as another person in another world.
This is a natural and instrumentally useful human activity, although in most cases the "other world" is very similar to one's own. Most of the time when you're - cooperatively or competitively or both - working in an environment with other people, who have their own experiences and goals, taking on those experiences and guessing at how they'd reasonably react, or how you'd react in their situation, if you had their experiences.
Put it in a magic circle: that's a game, maybe. "Game" is one of those fraught terms too. "Let's pretend" is a better statement of the kind of activity and lineage I'm thinking of. (There's a magic circle around "let's pretend," that marks it off from the kinds of artificial role-taking and occasional outright deception that form a part of normal, instrumental life.)
Rectification of names
The language we use in elfgames tends to reflect the more developed vocabulary we have for games and fiction, than for let's pretend.
Thus, we talk about "roleplaying games" that consist of "players" and a "gamemaster;" we tend to talk about pretend people as "characters," their pretend world as "setting," and our act of pretending as "fiction." The person one pretends to be, if one is most participants, is a "player character." None of this is wrong, per se, but I think it puts things in the wrong frame.
So: pretend worlds, people, events.
why the game and story frames?
I think the language of fiction and of games tends to get two things right, which is maybe why (alongside other historical reasons) these have loomed large in framing these kinds of let's pretend activities.
First, fiction and games are our baseline model for purely frivolous activities, and the frivolity of let's pretend is something I love and want to hold onto, even if we can deploy it for more serious purposes.
Second, if you're pretending to be in a situation of deep conflict and tough decisions, that's something that naturally generates gamelike challenge and narrative drama. Pretense is a naturally generous mode.
joesky tax: 1d6 bags of holding
I've always disliked this magic item, which, like darkvision, has a value proposition of playing the game less. Some are strictly worse, others just meant to be totemic
- Balloon of holding. Everything inside this expandable bag weighs nothing, but retains its original volume, so that it floats like a balloon. At sufficient size, can and will lift whatever is tethered to it (retrieve and stuff in things to adjust the displacement of the air.)
- Workaday bag. Things can be put in at any time, but only retrieved during the workday of a husbandman - dawn to dusk, excluding festival days, sabbath days, and the fallow season.
- Lunar bag. Things can only be put in when the moon is waxing, and only taken away when the moon is waning.
- Bag of ages. Anything put in this bag comes out with the wear of one (d6: 1 day, 2 season, 3 year, 4 decade, 5 century, 6 millennium).
- Paperweight of holding. Compresses volume without reducing weight.
- Tome of holding. Spend an hour writing a very detailed description of something you have in your possession and it will fade away. Rip out a page, spend an hour dramatically reciting its contents, and rip it up; the thing will appear before you. 100pp.