What's the point of a role-playing game?
What's the point of a role-playing game?
Because it’s fun, you’re saying. Steve Perrin said something similar in Wild Hunt #16, 1976: “The idea, good people, is to have fun.” Well, certainly, but that can’t be the end of the discussion, can it? It’s extremely easy to oversimplify any question that you’re not willing to explore in more meaningful detail, but, at least in my estimation, these kinds of explanations are shallow; meant more to evade the question rather than to engage with it. After all, myriad recreational activities are considered “fun”. Playing video games, reading fantasy novels, joining an improv group, and going to the theater all might, in a broad sense, be considered enjoyable activities to participate in, yet people choose to spend their Saturday nights playing a role-playing game instead. What is it about role-playing games that makes them singular?
In the 1970s and early 1980s, these kinds of philosophical questions were commonplace, although, even then, dissenters would respond with dismissal. When Stephen Lortz wrote his series, “What Is A Role-Playing Game?” in Chaosium’s magazine Different Worlds, published throughout 1979, the response was not always positive. “I suggest you get rid of this ridiculous series by Stephen L. Lortz,” one letter responds. “He discusses RPG in the most abstract terms for no discernible purpose.” Anecdotally, in conversations that I’ve had with fellow hobbyists, I’ve heard these kinds of thoughts referred to as “pointless semantics”.
I would posit that discussions such as these are not purposeless or pointless, but important to the evolution of any form, particularly those that could be considered an artform. Board game designer, Clint Bigglestone, observed in Different Worlds #3 in 1979, “no two people appear to agree on exactly what ‘role-playing’ is” and the same could be said of any modern contemporaries. In fact, I would argue they’ve given up in the attempt to come to an agreement on the subject at all, adopting a “different strokes” approach in order to on-board new hobbyists more quickly, even if it’s at the cost of the quality of their time spent. “What is a role-playing game?” you might ask, as Stephen Lotz did, and there are no shortage of YouTube commentators to wish and wash about how it’s whatever it means to you, as long as you’re ordering Heroforge miniatures, subscribing to D&D Beyond, or buying Czepeku map packs, etcetera, and don’t forget to use a discount code to receive an extra 15% discount at checkout.
In YouTuber Phil Edwards’s video, The Secret Economics of Dungeons & Dragons, he gives a surface level overview of the market that exists peripherally around the hobby. From custom dice producers, to scented candle makers, to digital designers offering models for 3D printers and making upwards of $20k a month from Patreon subscribers alone. All of this business was made possible by the Open Gaming License, issued by Wizards of the Coast in the year 2000 in a “grow the pie strategy”, and ultimately adopted in concept by the majority of smaller publishers and their respective game systems. With professional gamemasters charging nearly a thousand dollars for 5 hours of gameplay, Critical Role selling out Wembley Arena in 2023, Dimension 20 selling out Madison Square Garden in 2024, games like the Cosmere RPG making $15 million on Kickstarter, and not to mention the monies accumulated from officially licensed products and traditionally published rulebooks, it’s safe to say that the tabletop role-playing market is a three billion dollar industry, and that’s only a conservative estimate.
This financial success has surely made the hobby more diverse, but it’s less clear whether it’s made it any stronger. In its heyday, it was certainly far less commercial, but a less jaded explanation for why the standard of the discourse has degenerated is simply because role-playing games are now mainstream. Despite the recent surge of popularity in the mid 2010s, it wasn’t previously abstruse. Dungeons & Dragons had been in the cultural consciousness throughout the 80s and 90s, even if only conceptually, thanks to free publicity of the Satanic Panic. Even before Netflix’s Stranger Things, D&D had been showcased in episodes of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks & Geeks, That 70’s Show, and Community. Once something becomes fully integrated into culture, it is considered rote.
It was not always so. When the hobby was newly burgeoning, its participants were finding the language in which to not only describe it, but to codify it. Styles of wargaming, miniature and classical, each coming from various in-group philosophies, were then colliding with the science fiction and fantasy fandoms, the latter of which offered an organizational structure in which this discourse could flourish: clubs, conventions, and published amateur magazines, then called fanzines, now more commonly referred to as simply zines.
Role-playing games began so far outside of integration that, at their earliest, there were hardly any rules, and players were defaulting to the traditions of the hobbies that brought them to it. There was little guidance on what the capacity of any of the players even was during a role-play game. It was debatable, for example, as to who proposes the action to the referee (often called the “caller”), by what means they propose it (only clarified as a discussion between players in Metamorphosis Alpha in 1976), or who rolls the dice. Many referees who came from the tradition of Kriegsspiel wargamers, “preferred to do all the die rolling, providing a narrative for the players,” as George Phillies wrote in Wild Hunt, 1975. Others, like Lee Gold, the editor of Alarums and Excursions in Los Angeles, were allowing players to roll for themselves.
Original D&D states, “These rules [...] remain flexible. As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaigns.” Miniature wargames, which role-playing games had assumed some of their aspects from, had long positioned themselves as prescriptive rather than restrictive, and just like in miniature wargames, there was much disagreement on how to institute them. In How to play War Games in Miniature, by Joseph Morschauser, 1962, the author wrote, “War gaming in miniature is a personal activity and each war gamer has ideas different from the next. No one conforms.”
While the wargame Strategos in the 1880s suggested that “anything can be attempted”, allowing players free reign within the realities of the situation, this new breed of role-playing games were not based on historical realities, breaking out of the framework that even the proto role-playing games like Fight in the Skies, 1968, or Western Gunfight, 1970, pioneered. It became necessary for participants to discuss with one another, cross-pollinating ideas, in order to simply parse the procedure of the game (or games, as it quickly became).
In fact, the term “role-playing game” was one of the earliest debates. Although the term had been used by the military in certain political wargames as early as a decade earlier, it had not been officially employed in this new genre of game, transitioning away from strict wargaming, until the publisher Flying Buffalo used it in advertisements for Tunnels & Trolls, in 1975, and later printed it within the text of its followup, Monsters! Monsters!, in 1976. Previously, it had been used colloquially amongst hobbyists and reviewers, but never officially. Only afterward did TSR put the term on its Metamorphosis Alpha packaging, but the closest they had come before then was stating, “players must decide what role they will play in the campaign”.
Even then, the term “Role-Playing Game” was not an exclusive one, and would not be for some time. “Fantasy Role-Playing” was equally as popular, if not more so in fan literature, and would then be used to describe the hobby as a whole, negating the “game” part entirely. Later, “Adventure Gaming” would almost overtake that one, removing role-playing from the equation—TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, appeared to prefer it to “role-playing game”. This disagreement as to terminology is a debate by proxy over the elements that make role-playing, fantasy, or adventure games fundamentally what they are, or are not. It was not just a debate over how to identify the hobby, it was dissent over the hobby’s identity.
The state of this conversation has not improved in the intervening years, not only because interest in the conversation has minimized, but because the measure of terminology can be fraught due to the limitations of language. When we argue that the hobby is or isn’t an act of “storytelling”, do we mean a story, in the colloquial sense of relating an account of interesting events, or do we mean story in a formal sense of employing literary devices to convey complex, narrative ideas? When we insist it is or isn’t a game, do we mean the word to represent players competing for a win state in accordance with a set of rules, or do we mean it in the way that children mean it when they act out scenarios together, with little structure? Story or story, Game or game. How can anyone even hope to communicate in this fog of words?
Nuances in language can be an easy trap to fall into, and although these kinds of discussions have been occurring since the very conception of the hobby, they have always been limited by parlance. This is, in fact, semantics, but not trivially so. If each gamer has ideas different from the next, and no one conforms, then attention needs to be paid to how ideas are communicated, and, as we’ve established, ideas need to be communicated in order for a hobby to thrive. Problematically, there’s no constraining the spread of information in the age of the internet, but there’s also no verifying it, either. Mystic Arts says gamemastering and directing movies are the same thing… are they? Ginny Di says playing role-playing games isn’t improv… is it? In an article for USA today, Jordan Culver wrote “at its core [role-playing games are] about collaborative storytelling..” but is that true? Where is the peer review of the 1970s?
When more seasoned hobbyists observed what they called “The Mercer Effect”, wherein new players came into the hobby with the expectations that it resemble the Actual Play programs that became popular on Twitch and YouTube in the mid-2010’s, it was not unlike the feelings of older hobbyists in the 1980s who were encountering waves of new, much younger players with no roots in wargaming or role-playing, and only desired optimization and the accumulation of in-game power. Bill Seligman, writing in Alarums and Excursions #58, 1980, said that these news players “give us some idea of what the hobby will become if popularized”. In both cases, the recent or the past, the hobby, which never had a very singular identity to begin with, was losing a grip on its insular in-group, and by extension, its sense of self.
In the 1980s, this occurred because of a ballooning of participants. A decade earlier, there were 100,000 wargame enthusiasts, as estimated by Strategy & Tactics #42, 1974. Two years later, in the summer of 1976, Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, suggested that the number was then 300,000. By 1980, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition's Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide combined sold over 390,000 copies, and the Basic edition was selling over 600,000 copies per year, as compiled by historian Ben Riggs in Slaying the Dragon, 2022. Of a local convention, John Sapienza said in Alarums and Excursions #51, 1979, “As I looked around the hall, I was rather startled to realize that the average age of the audience was 20 years younger than my own—too young to drive in most states. It appears that the biggest influx into FRP is in the high school (and younger) crowd.”
As previously discussed, modern tabletop role-playing games had a similar boost in popularity in 2015, bringing in a host of eager, young hobbyists, but we also face the problem of a fractured fandom experience. The internet may be increasingly showing signs of centralization, with power and control shifting towards a few large entities, but that does not necessarily equate to the user experience. Rather than a dozen or so grassroots fanzines in 1975, or several dozen RPG message boards in the early 2000s, there are now hundreds of individual blogs on privately hosted websites, or published to servers like Substack and Tumblr, and hundreds of thousands of video creators spread out across Tiktok and Youtube. When six players answer the same LFP post and sit down at a table together, how is there any way for them to be sure that they’re anticipating the same experience, even after a session zero?
This isn’t meant to rail against the modern age, but to showcase the situation that we find ourselves in, so that we can be thoughtful about it. There’s nothing much that can be done about the industrial complex of the social internet, but we can agree on how important it is to have these discussions of semantics; to openly discourse about what any of this is for, and why we do it. Too much time in this space is wasted rehashing basic advice, or banally debating the technical merits of different mechanical styles, or creating superfluous supplemental materials, all in an attempt to have the bell hit, the Patreon joined, the Kickstarter supported.
When you consume these various works, do you have a better understanding of your hobby? Wouldn’t you say that there’s enough gamemastering advice out there, explaining the difference between a sandbox and a railroad, consent checklists or lines and veils, dice pools or d20 systems? Isn’t there enough home rules, tactical maps, roll tables and custom dice trays? These questions are of course rhetorical, because of course there is—there’s no end to it. Plenty of space remains in the dialogue to carve out room for reflection, introspection, and hypotheses of what the hobby means, what it's for, and how we might make the most of it.
Even in the past, however, some hobbyists might have disavowed my semantics. In APA-L #519, 1975, Ted Johnstone wrote, “the point of the game is [...] to give them an exciting ride.” In the Empire of the Petal Throne, also 1975, a similar line of text can be found: “The objective is an interesting adventure, with enough danger for excitement…” The following year, Gary Gygax would share his opinion in Science Fiction & Fantasy Newsletter #87, writing, “progression, rather than winning per se, is the object”. The game, En Garde!, published in 1975 by the Game Designers' Workshop, seems to agree: “the player’s object is to accumulate as many status points as he can [...] in order to raise his social level.” Tunnels & Trolls, also 1975, would say something very similar: “the true object of this game is to accumulate as many experience points as possible and by this means advance your 1st level character into as much of a superperson as you can.” Many people, in other words, felt that the question of the hobby’s objective was not very deep at all, but rather that the point of playing the game was to play the game. The mechanics provide an experience, that experience is fun—end of story.
But this presupposes that role-playing games, despite the ultimate word in the only recently accepted name, are games at all. It’s difficult to make that argument without some farragoing qualifiers. For example, the lack of preordained goals. To put it in the words of the authors of Western Gunfight, writing in Wargamer’s Newsletter 141, role-playing games are “an informal ‘campaign,’ open-ended”. Open-endedness was a corner-stone aspect of early Dungeons and Dragons play, and still is, to some extent. Ed Simbalist wrote in Alarums and Excursions #35, “gamers play to win; role-players to enjoy the give-and-take of personal interaction with the other people around the table”. Allowing some variation of that definition, if you can’t win, if, in fact, no state of “winning” even exists, can you be a gamer? And if no player can be a gamer, can this be a game? It depends, of course, on what that means to you.
In his book, “Man, Play and Games”, published in 1961, sociologist Roger Caillois uses the terms “game” and “play” interchangeably, but separates them into categories, one of which, "Agôn" or "Competitive", being the classification that we would commonly associate with the idea of a game, but another, "Mimicry", being something closer to what you would find in a modern RPG. Of this type, he writes, “The rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor’s fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell. The spectator must lend himself to the illusion without first challenging the decor, mask, or artifice which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself.” Ergo, if a role-playing game is indeed a game at all, its object is total and complete immersion, and its fail-state, juxtaposed to a nonexistent win-state, is the loss of fascination. But who is the spectator that we fascinate?
As to the immersion of role-playing games, there is a goodly amount of consensus in early writings. Pieter Roos, writing in Wild Hunt #15, 1976: “The effect one is striving for, in more concrete terms, is the total immersion which can be obtained when reading a good book or viewing a good film. The person experiencing the book or film becomes lost in the sweep of action, oblivious to his real surroundings as he moves beside the characters portrayed before him.” Kevin Slimak, writing in the same time period, referred to this as “submerging” into a character, rather than immersing into the world itself, and Sandy Eisen called it “living the part.” In Europa, 1975, he wrote: “I found the first few games intensely enjoyable and exciting; I really lived the part and my ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ found myself there—in the dungeon.”
That immersion, many would assert, was accomplished through the titular act of role-playing. “The popularity of [RPGs] arises from its ability to appeal to the ‘Rommel Syndrome’—the feeling that one actually is the character represented in the game”, George Phillies wrote in American Wargamer, 1975. Although this kind of play was in hot dispute, it quickly grew in popularity, and by the late 70s it had begun to be codified in game text, such as in Starships & Spacement, 1978: “It cannot be overstressed that the player of the game should play a role as he determines his own character’s actions. That is, the player should form a concept in his own mind as to what type of person his character is and then act in accordance with these ideas.” Paul Mosher, writing in Alarums and Excursions #50, took a theatrical approach to his advice on “How to play a role?”, suggesting the famously thespian practice of finding a character’s motivations: “Is the young woman leaving home to raise her family’s station in life or because of an unusual wanderlust? Is the Prince seeking a suitable wife so he may legally ascend the throne or has he been banished by the King? Once the player has determined this motivation, he is ready to breathe life into the character.”
When it comes to the object of role-playing games being to mimic and fascinate, you’ll also find much early assent, though, perhaps, not in those exact words. Jack Harness, who wrote in Empire #21, 1975, seemed to agree with Caillois’s measure: “The play’s the thing, not the winning of the battle. It’s impromptu improvisational theater, where all the audience are players, including the Dungeonmaster”. In 1977, the game Superhero ’44 concurred in its rulebook, starting: “somewhere along the line fantasy games began to resemble improvisational theater.” Stephen L. Lortz, in a later piece for Different Worlds #2, 1979, entitled, “Dramatic Structure of RPGs,” professed his estimation of the role-playing games in terms more akin to cinema than theater. The gamemaster, he proposed, was not a player, but rather she is a director (or, as it were, perhaps an editor): “the art of running an RPG lies in the game-master’s ability to order moves and sequences into a dramatically satisfying whole,” he wrote. Scott Bauer, writing in Alarums and Excursions #60, 1979, was in agreement: “[Fantasy Role-Playing Games] is one of the performing arts, and so is closer to film and the theater than to literature.”
That last point, however, was one of the most contentious of its day, and—I would argue—still is. As we’ve already discussed, the very genesis of the hobby was due, in part, to the culmination of the wargaming tradition and the science-fiction and fantasy fandom. There is no escaping a genetic link in tabletop role-playing games to a legacy of literature. As far back as Western Gunfight, in 1970, its authors were writing in Wargamer’s Newsletter #141 that, ““a narrative is invaluable for whipping up enthusiasm among the players.”
Jim Michie, went even further, writing in Wild Hunt #10, 1976: “We can begin to improve our own game by learning some of the arts of the story teller: the art of building a picture in the minds of players, the art of giving leading hints and suggestions so that they can begin to anticipate the suspected action about to be revealed, the art of building suspense, the art of the surprise and the reasonable result.” Surely, if Jim had been born a few decades later, he’d have done numbers on YouTube. One of his contemporaries, Wayne Shaw, wrote in Lords of Chaos #2 the following year: “I play Dungeons & Dragons as an exercise in creative story telling…”
So-called “Narrative-style” games are a generally accepted genre of role-playing game in today’s market, with such popular games as Blades in the Dark & the more recent Daggerheart, but Bunnies & Burrows, published in 1976, had been ahead of that particular curve. Its text reads that “players should be highly encouraged to invent and tell [...] stories” and that the gamemaster should “encourage such stories by giving experience [...] to the rabbit of a player that tells a good tale.’ There is a general consensus that some semblance of “creative story-telling” is involved in, at least, gamemastering a role-playing game, but, as discussed there are many mediums to tell a story, and varying ways to interpret the word “story”, and even the word “narrative”. Fortunately, others had more specific conceptualizations.
Mark Chilenskas writing in Wild Hunt #7, 1976, narrowed the scope of what medium of story-telling he was discussing: “[...] here the gamesmaster fulfills his role as a novelist.” The rules for Traveller, 1977, would echo this sentiment: “the scenario resembles a science-fiction novel, in that some basic goal or purpose is stated, and the adventure occurs as the group strives to achieve the goal.” Lewis Pulsipher observed in White Dwarf, 1977, “D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel.” In his estimation of the time, this was a split perspective.
If half of Dungeons & Dragons players wished it to be a fantasy novel, Gary Gygax, the game’s co-creator, disagreed with them. In his essay, “Books Are Books, and Games Are Games, and Never the Twain . . .” written in The Dragon #31, he wrote, “novels fix character roles to suit a foreordained conclusion” whereas “game personae must be designed with sufficient flexibility so as to allow for participant personality differences and multiple unknown situations.” Otherwise, the game is “merely an endless repetition, with a few possible variations”. But we must also remember that Gary was strictly in the camp of people who believed the point of gaming was the game itself. “The object of the character in the fantasy adventure game,” he writes in the same article, “is to provide the player with a means of interacting with the scenario, a vehicle by which the participant can engage in game activity.”
There were other contemporaries to Gygax who disagreed, too, though. Ed Simbalist wrote in Alarums and Excursions #47: “If one could tell stories through the application of random factors alone, the greatest novels, etc. would be written by computers.” With his assertion that “dice are dumb”, I have the feeling that Ed would have had a lot to say about the current debates of AI “art”. Having a few years for perspective himself, Glenn Blacow notes in Wild Hunt #50, 1980, that “some degree of story-telling is needed for running almost any successful FRP campaign” but that “purely story-telling games are rare indeed”. He continued, “everything in the story is pre-written by the Gamesmaster, then there will be little flexibility in what happens. In such games, there is a distinct feel of the PCs just acting out an unwritten script.” Bill Seligman was perhaps the firmest dissenter, writing in Alarums and Excursions #44, “In a story, the hero has to win and bed the heroine to satisfy the readers. To satisfy the players, the DM has to reward the players when they are clever, destroy them when they are stupid.”
In our modern time, there are at least some who take a moment from peddling products to discuss the philosophy of gaming. Talking into the camera on his YouTube channel, The Tomb of Lime Gaming, Matthew Ratcliffe begins by agreeing how important stories and storytelling is to the human condition, but that they are not compatible with role-playing games. “What you’re really offering” when you use the story-telling arts in role-playing games “is something like twenty different constructed narratives, one of which is ‘the best one.’ If you were going to write your story as a novel, you would have just picked that one. The rest are just 19 other worse stories, which your players can choose if they like.” He emphasizes that more attention should be paid to what role-playing games do that are unique to them and that they do particularly well, rather than just trying to simulate the experience of other mediums. “You really want to be careful when you’re designing for an RPG; you don’t want to end up just making a worse version of something else, because, if you do, then your players should probably just be doing that instead.” To Matt, the benefit of a role-playing game, and what it offers singularly over other mediums, is "unparalleled agency and freedom” to make decisions with real consequences. Players, he reckons, should be more than just “dice rollers” or part of a “binary choice algorithm”. They should be contributing something that is “unique to them, as a player”.
Ben Milton, on his YouTube Channel, Questing Beast, comes to a similar conclusion, while simultaneously reaching across time to disagree with the all-but-accidental decision of placing “role-playing” at the forefront of the hobby: “I don’t think the activity of role-playing [...] is really at the core of what sets these types of games apart from all the others.” In his estimation, role-playing is only a technique that can be added to almost any time of game to add a new element to it.” (Steve Jackson, in Different Worlds #2, back in 1979, had said something similar about the game of Monopoly exhibiting the qualities of role-playing, and 45 years later, the YouTuber Deficient Master would turn Monopoly into a role-playing game.) To Ben, what makes role-playing games unique is that they are “open games, rather than closed games.” In essence, the players are not limited by the rules of the game, but expected to act outside of them, within the constraints of the setting. To “attempt anything”, in the tradition of Strategos and Kriegsspiel wargaming. “In an open-ended game, like an RPG, you can have these truly free choices, which have a lasting impact on the game, which neither the game designer, nor the gamemaster, could anticipate.” To both Ben and Matt, agency and freedom of choice are key.
Personally, I’m partial to these two estimations of the hobby’s strengths. I don’t think of role-playing games as improvisational theater or even as a “game”, in the competitive sense, but rather one of cooperative play, as children might learn to do. I’d be loathe to use them to simulate the experience of other mediums, as Robin Laws thought when he wrote in Alarums and Excursions #157, 1988, “Adventure RPing, as far as I’m concerned [is a] simulation of adventure movies, TV shows, stories, or comics.” As a novelist myself, I certainly don’t think of them as a form of narrative story-telling, and I think the idea of running a role-playing game as a structured story, let alone participating in one created in that manner, to be mentally exhausting. I wouldn’t, however, disqualify the importance of “role-playing” from its uniqueness, as Milton might, or downplay that aspect of it, considering it only a matter of acting as a person would in the situation that the game presents, as a traditional wargamer might. But if it’s the freedom of choice that role-playing games do best, to what end? That is not a sufficient enough answer. In my view, there is something else that a role-playing game may uniquely offer, piggy-backing off of its “unparalleled agency”. It can, in the right context, create a sense of catharsis.
Len Kanterman and Charles Elsden wrote an essay in 1977 called: “Introduction to Yourself: Dungeons & Dragons for Beginners,” published in Campaign #81. “D&D may provide a path of insight into one’s own thoughts and his relationship to the others,” they wrote, asserting that the act of role-playing was an act of getting to know one’s self, rather than one’s character. “Like the psychodrama games of the mid-sixties, designed to put one in touch with one’s self and his fellows, D&D can become a vehicle for increased self-knowledge.” In Different Worlds #5, 1979, John Sapienza wrote that “RPG is a psychodrama; your character is yourself, in a number of deep and not-fully-understood ways, regardless of the ways in which it differs from the real-world player.” There were more than a few references to RPGs being a form of psychodrama, in this time period, due to the then recent work of psychosocialist Jacob Levy Moreno, who had pioneered the use of role-playing and improvisation to help patients explore their emotions and experiences, as well as using group-therapy, in the 1930s. Moreno’s ideas and methods were adopted and iterated on by the next generation of psychotherapists.
When Clint Bigglestone wrote his article, “Role-Playing: How to Do It”, in Different Worlds #3, in 1979, he was intending his advice to be taken in the framework of acting, but it’s difficult to not also see its use in the development of the self, and the formation of empathy. He underlined the importance of playing characters very different from yourself, both in morality or in the effect of personality. For example, “if you are an introvert, play a loud-mouthed extrovert.” If you intend to play a character of a different gender or sexuality identity, he advises that you first engage with people of that ilk: “Don’t go it alone. Talk to your spouse, lover, sibling, parent, friend, etc. about what it’s like to be of their sex. [...] for those of you who are straight/gay, take the same steps with regard to communicating with your gay/straight friends and relatives.”
In their article for IN Magazine, Rowan O’Brien described the way that role-playing games have been used by the LGBT+ community to explore their own sexuality and gender expression, from seducing same-sex NPCs, or experiencing in-game dysphoria, you can “use your character as a human (or elf or orc) shield from any suspicious fellow players who wonder how much of yourself you’re pouring into your character.” In the writer’s estimation of the hobby, it can be used as a “therapeutic tool” that “allows you to explore situations and emotions without putting yourself in a physically compromising situation, as well as having the extra safety feature of being able to stop the scene whenever you want.” Nearly the definition of a psychodrama. Back in 1976, Jim Michie wrote in Wild Hunt #10, “Each player tends to project aspects of personality on the characters, aspects which he either admires or hates, depending on his nature,” which interlocks “into the life of the character(s) he is controlling.”
Although the field of research is still relatively small, several academic papers concur with O'Brien's article. In one study, interviewing 10 participants from the UK in 2024, and found that all of them said that tabletop role-playing games had a positive impact on their mental health. The author of the paper also noticed a trend of players using their characters to explore aspects of their personal identity, such as one interviewee who came out as queer via their character doing so within the fiction. Another study in 2024 recruited 25 participants to play in 8 week campaigns, conducting surveys throughout. By the end of the study, the participants saw improvements in all measured scales, experiencing less symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, as well as seeing improvements in self-esteem and self-efficacy.
In a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults who play tabletop RPGs at least once a month, conducted by the online marketplace, StartPlaying, 76% of the participants said that RPGs have helped them process trauma or emotional growth, and 31% said it was one of the main reasons they play. Almost 9 in 10 participants said that RPGs help them mentally reset, and over 2 in 5 said they played to relieve stress and gain mental health benefits. This is in addition to the large number of participants who said they forged new friendships and romances, strengthened existing ones, and credited these RPGs with keeping their support groups intact.
Eric Holmes was a professor of neurology for the University of Southern California, and also the editor of the Basic Set of D&D, released in 1977. In 1980, he wrote an article, entitled, “Confessions of a Dungeon Master” for Psychology Today, in which he shared his opinions on the experience of a role-playing game. “The world of Dungeons & Dragons is produced by its social reality. It is a shared fantasy, not a solitary one.” When a group of players engage in the hobby, they agree “to accept that world,” and in doing so, “the fantasy has become a reality, a sort of giant folie á deux, or shared insanity.” Of players exhibiting their free agency to commit any number of offenses, such as “murder, pillage, arson and rape”, he writes: “The Dungeon Master’s World is a sort of giant Rorschach’s test.” A game to probe the unconscious mind.
One wonders if all of the varying styles of play, which you might mistakenly cite as differences of opinions as to the basis of the game itself, weren’t actually, at their core, the search for this catharsis. The intellectually unchallenged yearning to exhibit their problem-solving, the isolated using a safe space to practice their social improvisation, aspiring authors seeking the gratification of instant feedback, would-be actors using the table to flex their theatrical chops, marginalized or otherwise powerless people looking to feel super-powerful, and maybe those apprehensive of their ordinariness wanting to feel extraordinary, etcetera. If so, role-playing games may not be a game at all, nor even a narrative, but rather a support group, and conflict between players, the phenomenon of the “problem player”, is more so a disagreement on what the objective of this particular support group, this campaign, will be.
Some will, of course, disagree with me, and that’s to be expected. The conversation can, and should, go on. If we want to see our hobby appreciated as an artform, the focus of discourse must be shifted away from mechanics, merchandise and marketing, and again give due consideration to the nature of the game itself. When a young person, newly energized by the next Stranger Things, comes to you to ask what this role-playing thing is all about, what are you going to tell them? Is it about writing pages of lore, in-depth character biographies, and compelling narratives? Is it about collecting dice, designing miniatures, and drawing maps? Or is it just something fun to do with your friends, no more special than a rowdy game of Candy Land? What’s the point of a role-playing game to you? Tell that kid why you do it.