TotD: Robin Laws on Roleplaying Games

I hadn’t ever thought of it this way, but I think the man is on to something.

“One of my pet theories about the popularity of roleplaying games goes like this. Roleplaying is fantasy shopping for guys. That is, men would, as a group, be more interested in shopping if a) it meant never having to leave the house and b) they were shopping for super-powers. In that case, the typical roleplaying rulebook is like a Nieman-Marcus catalog for super-powers. Depending on the game system and character type, these extraordinary abilities might be called feats, spells, schticks, disciplines, skills, high tech gear, psionics, or whatever. For lack of a a better all-encompassing term, I refer to these things as crunchy bits.”
Robin D. Laws, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering