I don’t understand roleplaying and creativity

I don’t think I have a point to this, I’m just having a lot of Thoughts 🤓

So I don’t remember much about my childhood at all anyway, but I don’t think I recall doing a lot of playing. I’m sure I did, I know I sometimes dressed up in my grandma’s old dresses, we played hide and seek with the neighbors etc, but I don’t remember being super interested in dolls and stuff.

I’ve been playing the Sims on and off for many years, but I always get bored because I never do the interesting storylines and plots - I’m just using the functions of the game, and ultimately just do the same things every time. I’ve put in a few hundred hours in Baldur’s Gate 3, and I read about people planning out backstories and assigning meaning to different dialogue options for roleplaying reasons, but I don’t really know how to do that? I mean, I technically know, I understand what they’re doing, but I just make a character that seems fun to play and choose dialogue options that seem like the right thing to do or that I know will give me the result I need for xp or whatever I need.

I always knew I wasn’t a super creative personality and struggled to «get into character», but it’s back on my mind now because I was invited to a discord server that plays Mafia, which I hadn’t heard of before. I did a quick google search and honestly didn’t love the concept (in fact the idea of a group game with vague structure and improv stressed me tf out and I cried), but the friend who invited me told me they do a pretty relaxed game so I can just write when I feel like it and I would know several people from another server, and I figured okay I’ll try it out and maybe it will be fun. Well, immediately there’s lots of people and so many messages, pages and pages of role descriptions and rules (which are to the point and technically easy enough, but I require so much more details and I don’t know how to ask for it without looking downright stupid). Turns out they’re going all in with a full theme, characters with background stories that match their role and adds to some plot and I have zero clue what is happening. How are they coming up with these characters and somehow agreeing on this plot? It feels like they all had some kind of discussion that I wasn’t part of or are communicating telepathically to discuss details to progress the story.

The social part of it is so stressful, I don’t understand the game, and I am honestly reading these people writing messages in character and rolling my eyes. And they’re talking about people being suspicious and picking apart someone’s defense and I’m just like HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT???

I am perfectly capable of using humor and sarcasm, and riffing off someone in a fun conversation, but that’s based on real life stuff and I understand the rules of a normal conversation. And within that conversation I might say «haha, imagine if..», and it might be an absurd idea but it’s not fantasy. I used to write short stories as a kid, so I clearly had some imagination then, I know I am mostly a fun and likeable person, but I just don’t feel creative at all and the added social aspect just makes it a nightmare. At least I’ve ruled out improv as a hobby or future career path…