Flame on,
You're spot on about RPGs taking you away from the real world. That's the point. Its like a controlled lab in which you can experiment with things in a safe way. It allows you to try things that might be dangerous in real life. Its magick in a box. How much of it you decide to let out is entirely up to you, and easy to control. No, its not as intense as doing it for real. Again, that's the point of it. However, you can do things with it you just can't in the fleshy world, which is also quite a tool for exploration.
Then there's this bit, what Lothar was getting at with shamanic storytelling: When we experience a reality, be it dream, story, conversation, movie, book, street mime, baseball card, or anything which causes us to construct an inner world and experience it, that reality is on some level treated as real by our confused psyche. So, if you RPG magical change and in the process learn things from it, you've still learned and thus changed. Magic is sneaky that way. Language is a virus, etc etc. That change might be from D&D that a Longsword +9 will kill an orc soundly. Or, it can be something like Kindred of the East, where your character advances as they gain enlightenment in a custom religion about transforming from a monster into a functional supernatural being.
The relevant bit to fictionsuiting, is that the process in RPGs of creating and developing a character can be applied to the construction, delination, control and use of a fiction suit in real life. Look at the process, not the variables, and see what you can take from it. Your User's Manual is already written. Its the char gen section of every White Wolf game to come out in the past 10 years. The important leap is, stepping away from the game and doing it for real. |
), and learning to deal with rage by playing a half-Klingon (BEFORE Behlana existed). Anyway... it may not sound particularly inspiring, but they were important moments in the development of my own personal paradigm. 
