As kids, a lot of us would play pretend. For some it’s as simple as pretending to be a family in a play house or taking turns as a police officer and a criminal. While others chose to pretend as more unique beings like superheroes, mermaids, and even fairies.
When we pretended to be these different characters, that was in a way our first ventures into RPing. After all, if you were pretending to be a fairy, you did not have real wings of your own, or the abilities of a fairy. You had to pretend and explain with your words and actions to seem like a fairy. You could talk like you thought a fairy would, pick flowers to make a flower crown, use a stick as a wand, use glitter as pixie dust, and run as if you were flying.
What did you do for playing pretend when you were younger, and how has that helped you as an RPer today?
I literally have a mental condition called Maladaptive DAYDREAMING Disorder, I’m always daydreaming- So I think it helps with being more creative with ideas ripp.
But when it comes to childhood I had and still have a large imagination, I love to write and it genuinely brought out my love for RP.
Before i found out about rp, Me and my sister used to tell stories and pretend to be celebs living in one big house. We would talk as different celebs and even make up people and talk for them. Me having a big imagination and doing that really made roleplaying more easy to get used to. I even made some characters from our talks in some of the rps i’m in.
My childhood friend and I would always pretend we’re Ariel and her daughter. Always. Or we would pretend we’re surfers for some reason haha
I’m not sure if that helped me in any way. I have really bad memory so I don’t really remember that part of my life but I’m a daydreamer and I like to imagine all this different scenarios so I think that somehow helps.
Oh my god, I have that too, but I diagnozed myself with it becuase now that I’m an adult I’m afraid of going to the shrink and when I was a kid I thought it was just because kids are creative and stuff.
But my MDD (reffering to Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder flike this from now on) is different because I basically get cool ideas and stuff when I spin around to music. It also clears my head sometimes.
That’s not Maladaptive Daydreaming, and you shouldn’t self-diagnose. Maladaptive daydreaming can interfere with daily life and cause a lot of problems for people with it, it isn’t just ‘getting cool ideas’ (which is someone everyone does). It’s like saying you have depression because you get sad sometimes, or you have anxiety because you’re an introvert. It demeans people that actually have the disorder.
Back on topic-
I played pretend a lot as a kid, and I like to act in plays and stuff. RPing is a lot like scriptwriting, where you’re describing a characters words and actions.
Trust me, I said “getting cool ideas” to stop myself from figuring out how it really feels when I spin around for hours on end and not writing out that abbomination of mixed feelings and such. I probably do have maladaptive daydreaming disorder becuase up until this point I loathed myself for doing this because I was the only person who was doing that, and when I googled something along the lines of “spinning to music” and stuff like that an artickle about MDD showed up and I felt so wholesome when the article was actually a somewhat good enough explanation of why I kept doing this and never seeming to be able to stop or function withouth it.
I think that playing make-believe and games that involve your imagination as a child, do help with your creativity. This, in turn, makes a good stepping-stone to RPing and creativity it involves.