The Magic of Tabletop Roleplay
Author’s Note: This article was written originally for Fabled Magazine but didn’t fit well with the other material, so I figured I may as well publish it over here! Perhaps it’s a wee bit dressed up from its original draft though to include more of my personality and personal stories, since it’s not going into a magazine anymore 😉
“Have you heard of Dimension 20?” was probably one of the most unexpected gateway questions I’ve ever been asked.
At the time, back in around 2018, the answer had been “no,” I had not yet heard about the Dungeons & Dragons actual play series that was debuting on Dropout.tv, the then-new streaming service from College Humor (recently rebranded as Dropout).
The question was optimally timed though, because I had a newly budding interest in tabletop roleplaying games, or TTRPGs. A longstanding lover of fantasy adventures but averse to tropes and flat narrative, I had a waning fascination with adventure video and board games due to the limitations in non-player-character interactions. It’s impossible, after all, for a video game to capture the nuances of conversation, and I was in a place where I wanted to explore worlds, not just touch their surfaces. This was no more evident in than in the board game, Kingdom Death: Monster, which had a really cool world but was an abysmally bad board game (yes, I know that’s an unpopular opinion and yes, I will defend it).
Dimension 20 opened a new door into the world of fantasy for me in ways that I didn’t expect. Firstly, it has a phenomenal community of actors and improvisers that treat one another as peers and collaborators, as opposed to rivals and nemeses. From Dimension 20, I was introduced to new and different series like Not Another D&D Podcast, the Rotating Heroes Podcast, and Worlds Beyond Number, suddenly finding myself flush with different opportunities to be immersed in amazing worlds and incredible stories.
Several years and dozens of campaigns later, I will gladly go on record saying that some of the best storytelling I have experienced in my near-forty years of life has been witnessed in tabletop roleplaying games
Why is that? Well, first of all, because there’s more than just one mind going into the storytelling, and if they’re all on the same page, this means you can get multiple valuable inputs into the narrative. But more than that, the true game masters are the dice. This random element is something that no trope can survive. Anyone can die at any time, often for very silly reasons, because dice don’t care about plot armor any more than George R.R. Martin.
One of the saddest aspects of tabletop roleplay, though, is that most people think it’s just Dungeons & Dragons, which is certainly not for everyone. Fortunately, there are many, many games out there to pick from. For example, simple or even single page games like The Witch Is Dead – about a witch’s familiars seeking revenge for her death – or Liminal_ (Liminal Space) – about escaping a paranormal in-between world – make for fun one-shots that can be very useful for determining group dynamics before committing to longer campaigns. If you’re into apocalyptic settings, there are games like Mörk Borg or Arc (review coming in 2026) – the former being a dungeon crawler where the players can be different every time but the GM keeps progressing the end of the world, while Arc allows you to pick a pre-determined campaign length (1-3 sessions, for example) where players try to prevent an end of world scenario of their choice. If you just want to do something trippy and esoteric, where anything can happen, Troika might be the game for you.
However, those games are all very mechanics-light, easy to learn quickly and play quickly. And I’m often playing devil’s advocate, because while watching Dungeons & Dragons campaigns is my favorite media to consume these days, I don’t actually like playing D&D that much due to its mechanics. Lucky for me then, there are options for vaster game systems as well. Pathfinder, for example, is one of D&D’s earliest offspring, which has a far more customizable game system, but the downside is that it’s very mechanics-heavy for those who don’t want to do extensive numerical work when making and leveling their character.
My personal favorite system is much lesser known: Zweihänder. Rather than the harsh 20-sided die (D20), it works on a D100 system, which is infinitely more forgiving to people like me who have terrible luck with dice. It has a good balance of customization, while being less punishing when you’re rolling poorly.
So it goes without saying that there are all sorts of systems and settings out there, as specific as the worlds of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek, or as random and specific as Slavic goblin raiding or heroic mice warriors. Even the fast food chain, Wendy’s, once made an RP parody system about fighting beef patties. Needless to say, in the world of tabletop roleplay, the possibilities are endless.
Personally, it’s the limitlessness of story potential that has me entirely hooked by tabletop roleplay. You can have a cool story imagined in your mind, only to have it ruined by a bad die roll, which can lead to unforeseeable consequences, in a way that’s quite akin to real life. While the general rule states that “RP may be therapeutic, it is not therapy,” there’s a lot to be taken away from roleplaying games, and I’m not just referring to the storytelling potential. You can explore aspects of yourself that you never get to let out in adult life. You can explore themes that you might be daydreaming about. One of my favorite quotes from Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was:
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” — Jojen Reed
Think about that in the context of roleplay! It’s truly a wonderful thing, to be able to escape whatever is going on in life for just a moment, to have different woes and quests to shake things up, to be someone and somewhere else for a few hours. It also has the upside of invoking real emotions in you, so it certainly keeps the brain juices flowing.
Personally, I’ve played an angry cleric, a tortured torturer, a toxically positive halfling, and a morally fluid half-orc, as well as a gremlin man, a gutterborn rat-child, a woodland creature, a shaved bear, a bellydancing priestess of Gaia, and my real self. Even on Substack, you can read about my newly starting adventures as an HR witch in the void, thanks to Nikki | Nocturnal Narrator!
So whether you’re looking for escapism, hoping to keep your brain active a few years longer, or if you’d just like to try something that’s not possible in real life, don’t forget that your imagination is an incredible playground, and if you need some structure to bring some dreams to life, roleplay could be the perfect place to explore.
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