Why TRPGs Are the Most Important Games of Our Time

I recently asked my players for some ideas about what to write about here; I wanted to approach the ways that my GM style can help folks who want to become better GMs. One of my players--the one who plays Beor in the mystery campaign--sent me the following response to my question, among other things: 

Other things that I think would be cool to read about are just the things you're most passionate about as a DM. What about being a DM do you LOVE? As a player wanting to DM at some point, I find I get most motivated when hearing about other people's passions as a DM (for ex: some DMs absolutely love puzzles, some really love story telling, some love combat, some really love making wacky NPCs, some are passionate about a world's religion...). I think there's a lot of inspirational power behind reading/learning about what someone REALLY loves and WHY.

I've made no secret about the fact that to me, the most exciting thing about Dungeons & Dragons and TRPGs like it is storytelling and roleplaying. But I want to expand on that and answer what Beor's player is getting at with his question. What about the game do I find inspirational, he wants to know. I am expanding that to answer this related question: why are TRPGs the most important games of our time? 

To begin, I want to address a few of the ideas I first wrote about in my gaming philosophy. I said there that collaborative storytelling is something that a TRPG is uniquely qualified to do. What I mean by this is simple. A TRPG is modeled from an early inspiration for D&D back in the 1970s; D&D creators Gary Gygax (who mostly developed the setting) and Dave Arneson (who mostly developed the numerical representations) were miniature wargamers before creating TRPGs. Their favorite hobby was creating miniatures who would fight in recreations of the Napoleonic War. But they toyed with a new idea: what if, instead of controlling dozens or even hundreds or troops in a battle, the player controlled only one individual soldier? From here, Gygax and Arneson developed D&D, a game where a single character allowed the player to interact with the world in more detail than wargaming would allow. What made D&D unique, that is to say, was the fact that a player could lose themselves in a single character--no other game at the time allowed this kind of direct control. (If the history of D&D is interesting to you, and you want more information about how it was created, check out the book Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt. It provides a gripping retelling of what D&D was like in the early days and traces it to the current day.)

From this framework, we can already understand D&D as pushing back against the established style of game-playing at its time. But it was more than that. Early D&D was very much the product of Gygax and Arneson's work, but they depended on their players to build the game. Modern players would be shocked to learn that some of the most iconic parts of the game were developed in response to player hijinks. Another story from Of Dice and Men: Arneson was running a game for his players early in the development of the game, and he asked his players what they wanted to create as a new part of the game. One player said they wanted to become a vampire, and so Arneson worked with the player for a few hours to develop rules for vampires. As the brainstorming session drew to a close, Arneson turned to another player and asked what they wanted to create, intending to get a leg up for next session. The player smiled and said they wanted to play a vampire hunter. That vampire hunter design, with its magical specialty against undead and its martial prowess, became the cleric. This illustrates that a class considered so essential to any game was invented not out of necessity but out of player choice. What a radical game that changes completely when a player makes a decision. 

So even early D&D delivered a unique experience--the players could, moreso than any other game or system, guide the game. Nowadays, with simpler rules and a range of modules, it is even easier for players to jump into the game. But a considerable truth cuts through the element of time in this equation: players in original D&D (or even the early draft called Chainmail) were as capable of telling stories centered on the players as players today with the refined and relatively intuitive 5e. D&D has been around for nearly 50 years, and the fundamental thing that has never changed is that the players impact the game. 

I don't need to tell you that players of other games can impact the proceedings as well, but the difference between taking a turn in Monopoly and taking a turn in D&D is obviously massive. There are precisely 11 outcomes when a player rolls the dice in Monopoly, and that's more or less the end of the story. But in a single turn, a D&D player can radically change the entire game. It's worth noting that Beor's player, who recommended this topic, once ended a campaign by turning on the party. A single choice changed everything. There is no single choice in a non-TRPG that affects every element of the game. But in TRPG, choices matter. 

And just as one player can radically change the game, we must remember that there is a whole party of players with the same capacity. Not only does each player affect the game, but they also affect each other. I've written about the way that each performer in a game affects every other performer, and it is undeniable that any agent, be they player, GM, or audience, will have an effect on the other agents. An experienced GM knows that allowing full choices to a group of players is basically playing with fire--there is no telling what will happen from the outset. 

Now let's put this in context. We have a game that allows players to do as they choose, players with the potential to change the game itself, and everyone being affected by everyone else's actions. Here's the big idea: this makes a TRPG the closest representation of real life that a game can be. Genuine choice? Check. Capacity to change the world? Check. Consequences for actions? Check. Video games attempt this kind of emulation of real life, but they can't manage it due to the infinite nature of choices. Sure, they can program in hundreds of possibilities, but players will always find reasonable ideas that aren't programmed in. TRPGs don't have that problem. A good GM can take a player choice and respond to it meaningfully, simulating that choice actually being made in the game world. And TRPGs are the only systems out there that allow for this. 

So if TRPGs are our best simulation of the real world, so what? The applications are endless, actually. A TRPG allows you to tell the most interactive stories possible, period. A TRPG allows you to experiment with decision-making, roleplaying, and storytelling, all done collaboratively. A TRPG can provide a safe space to explore emotional issues, as I did with my cleric Zig to learn to cope with guilt. In fact, I have been collaborating with an academic associate of mine to develop a variant of therapy that uses TRPGs' considerable tools for safe, constructive roleplaying. TRPGs can be used for educational purposes for any age, or as grounds for an improvised theater performance, much like we did for my podcast Listen Check. TRPGs excel in all of these things because they simulate the real world so well. 

But why do they simulate the real world so well? The rules help construct a reality we can recognize as similar to our own; we accept limitations on our actions because that is consistent with our world. The stories we write ourselves and use in modules are structured in logical ways; they allow us to become parts of a world that we understand. But both of these miss the crucial ingredient: the GM's and players' own internalized sense of the world. Whether you're playing a game that painstaking creates a gritty, realistic world or a picturesque high fantasy world, both the GM and that players have a sense of that world as real enough to inhabit, and it makes living in that world second nature. I might even extend this idea to say that it's not necessarily that TRPGs simulate the world in convincing ways per se, and that it is more an effect of humans being exceptionally geared toward roleplaying and world creation. We have been doing these things for about as long as we have been humans, so creating a game like D&D to facilitate making these world was both natural to humankind and only a matter of time. 

So why is this my favorite thing about GMing? Don't get me wrong: I love coming up with characters, both player characters and NPCs, both serious and wacky. I love storytelling and worldbuilding. I love the way players act when they're engaged in combat. I even like when the players are struggling over a riddle I was worried was too simple. These are all great experiences. But my favorite thing about GMing is the role of collaboration. My projected stories and notes are fine, but they won't win any book awards. My NPCs might be entertaining, but without the PCs, they would just be ideas in a vacuum. I can have all the details in the world about my homebrew world, but it's just a collection of hypothetical details until the players have been there. It's when the players start to make choices that the game comes together. 

Now I'm returning to my original claim. All of this might be true, but why does it make TRPGs the most important games of our time? Isn't that kind of a bold claim? It is, but I mean it. In my opinion, the world we have lived in across the globe for the last fifteen years or so (which coincide with the rise in TRPGs' popularity) has become increasingly structured to make certain experiences harder to get. Freely, creatively expressing ourselves has become more important to most of the world's cultures, but the ability to do so has been restricted. Connecting with other human beings is something we need for our mental health (particularly in the middle of a pandemic), but we are closed off from achieving that. TRPGs' benefits, like a feeling of agency and the ability to investigate our emotions and curiosities, are ever harder to find in real life. From this perspective, it's easy to see why TRPGs are more popular than ever; people want to feel the way the game makes them feel. 

So to put it all together, we have a system where one person is responsible for emulating a whole world for the investigation and experience of a group of players, who without realizing it, are the most powerful players of any game hitherto invented. This comes at a time when people are craving agency and connection. TRPGs are the soothing balm that treats the modern condition, in a sense. And for me, creating situations where my players can make meaningful choices, whether they succeed or fail, is the ultimate in expression through gaming. 

The thing that ultimately strikes me as funny about Beor's players question is that he lists several elements of the creative process of the game as potential favorites. But my actual favorite was "none of the above." It's not the act of creating that drives me the most; it's catering to players by reacting that floats my boat. The real magic of a TRPG will always be that the players have agency in a way that we don't feel in our day-to-day lives. Put another way, I love TRPGs because I can provide my players with the sense of creating something, helping decide what the story is, with being a part of a group, with being able to make meaningful decisions. That's the rush of a TRPG--the ability to truly take control of life, even if it's only fictional. 

That's the value of TRPGs as I see it. But I know there are lots of perspectives out there. Comment below with the reasons you prize playing roleplaying games, and be on the lookout for upcoming articles on uses for my expanded Wild Surge Table, how to deal with players ignoring the story, and my accents resource so you can keep your NPCs interesting. Until then, happy gaming!

Back to the homepage (where you can find everything!)