The Everything of D&D, or Why I Seem Obsessed

A lot of people think I'm obsessed with D&D, or roleplaying/tabletop games in general. Well allow me to explain why.

I have so many hobbies (sword fighting, survivalism, herb-lore, magic, history, fantasy, etc.) and I don't really have time for all of them on a frequent basis. Maybe I could do something for a week, then something else for the next week (I used to do this), but it's difficult to keep track of and enjoy all of those separate, and generally unlinked interests. At one point I even scheduled my day like school, devoting a half hour to hour of study for each subject, rotating daily.

Of course one of the biggest problems with most my interests is application. Aside from maybe martial arts and herblore (and even then...), most of my hobbies are dead in modern society, or of little use in other than scholarly study. I don't have a local combat club, real magic tends to just be chanting, and I love reading history, but that's the extent of its use.

When I started playing role playing games I found an outlet for most, if not all of my hobbies. My group started with BRP (Basic Role Playing). As game master I immediately delve into making my own fantasy worlds and settings, using the knowledge from all of my hobbies to make cool rules, or interesting challenges. As referee for old school D&D I can use my knowledge of how things worked in the middle ages to provide a believable atmosphere for play, and answer questions about most of the situations that come up.

So now a days when I'm looking up plants and see something is poisonous, or used for mental stimulation, I go "oh wow that'd be a great ingredient for D&D". When I'm studying long sword techniques I might learn something and think "this would be a great technique for D&D, it could this or that...". A lot of times it looks like I'm just thinking about role playing games 24/7, but in all reality, I finally found a unifying forum for all of my vocations and studies.

In other words D&D is great not only because it includes so much of everything, it can include anything. For those of us with obscure or "dead" interests, which seems to be the average player, it give us somewhere to make those interests useful, and we don't feel like we wasted our time looking up the difference between a voulge and a bardiche.

I guess what I'm getting at is role playing games gave me purpose in life. That seems a bit drastic, but my whole life I've been told I'm wasting my time doing this or that, because "it's no longer useful in life". It was a place where I felt useful, and maybe even appreciated.

Does anyone else have hobbies that tie into RPGs, or that you use frequently in your games?