First, some news: my friend Joel and I were joined by “one of the best essayists in America,” Phil Christman, for the most recent episode of our books-podcast, The Big Read Cast. In that episode, we discussed Adam Roberts’s dynamite book The This, which is equally about hive minds, social media, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The book is a delight, and I’m quite happy with our conversation. You can listen to it here!
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For about the last twenty years, I have been a devotee of a hobby that, despite its recent surge in popularity, is, let’s be real, deeply weird: As often as possible, I invite several of my friends to come over to my house and pretend to be elves and wizards while I, in turn, pretend to be bartenders, dragons, and warlocks, and, together, we make them fight and talk to each other. Or, sometimes, my friends pretend to be scientists and archeologists exploring an ancient ruin, and I pretend to be star-maddened cultists and ravening horrors from beyond our comprehension. Or, sometimes, we’re all characters in something like a Coen Bros. movie, royally screwing up a badly thought out heist.
Although people have been playing things like role-playing games for a very long time (murder mysteries, Jury Box, etc.) the modern tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) begins with Dungeons & Dragons, which itself was derived from earlier wargames and tactical miniature games. For many people, D&D is synonymous with the concept of a role-playing game, and even somebody like me, who plays a variety of different games, will usually say “I’m playing D&D” as shorthand when describing my evening plans to a friend, even though I may actually be playing Pathfinder, Dread, or Scum & Villainy.
The standard RPG setup is that one person is the Game Master (GM) (called “Dungeon Master” in D&D). That person creates or adapts a scenario, portrays the various monsters, antagonists, and other NPCs (non-player characters) with whom the PCS (player characters) interact, and adjudicates the rules for combat or other skill challenges, which usually requires the rolling of dice and the consultation of statistics. The PCs play the main characters of the story, and make interesting choices as they move through the scenario. I have served plenty of time in both roles, but for the last ten years or so I have usually been the GM, tasked with creating the scenario and, usually, herding the cats necessary to get five or six adult humans in a room for four or more hours.
I played a fair amount in high school, but it was in college that I really fell in love with the hobby. Starting a few months into my freshman year, my college roommate began running a game for me and a few of the guys in our dorm; by the end of college, we had gathered a large group of friends who were united largely by our love for role-playing games, and we had almost certainly spent more time over the previous four years rolling dice than we had going to class. I don’t believe this is an unusual story amongst role-playing devotees; certainly just saying “I love RPGs” does not render a person particularly interesting in our age of Stranger Things, Critical Role, and Dimension 20. Yet for all that roleplaying is one of my favorite hobbies, and for all that it’s becoming increasingly popular and mainstream, I can’t get over how fundamentally strange it is. That strangeness is, I think, the source of both its great strengths and its many opportunities to become obnoxious.
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